8ECJun OOPY, 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Chap. Copyright lo 

Shelf...jMi \ ^ \ 



I "X •-.. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



r_ 



APR 4 1899 



THE GOSPEL FOR 
A WORLD OF SIN 



•Tl^^^K-O 



THE GOSPEL FOR 
A WORLD OF SIN 



A COMPANION-VOLUME TO 
"THE GOSPEL FOR AN AGE OF DOUBT" 



HENRY VAN DYKE 



D.D. (PRINCETON, HARVARD, YALE), LL.D. (uNION) 
PASTOR OF THE BRICK CHURCH IN NEW YORK 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1899 

Ail rights reserved 



n 



-Ji^ 






29418 



COPYKIGHT, 1899, 



> ■^^•'•'j 



By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



TWO COP??-.':^ KEGCIVED. 



APR4™io99 1} 



Worfajooti 3P«03 

J. S. Gushing & Co. - Berwick & Smith 

Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 






JAMES OEMSBEE MUEEAY 

DEAN OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY 

A TEACHER OF LITERATURE AND LIFE 

A PREACHER OF RIGHTEOUSNESS AND LOVE 

A SERVANT OF HUMANITY AND CHRIST 

^f)ts Booft is ©eiJicateK 

IN GRATEFUL AFFECTION 



PREFACE 

This book is not meant to present a theory 
of the Atonement. 

On the contrary, it is meant to teach that 
there is no theory broad or deep enough to 
embrace or explain the fact. 

A sinful world cannot possibly know all that 
is needed to reconcile it with a holy God. 

Sin itself, in its root and in its relations, con- 
tains a mystery. 

So does love. 

But the Atonement is the work of God's 
love in its bearing upon man's sin. Therefore 
it must include more than we can explain. 

What Christ did to take away the sin of the 
world was precisely all that was needed, — 
neither more nor less. What we know of this 
need is what we know about the Atonement. 

One man sees one segment of the circle more 
clearly. Another man sees another segment, 
vii 



viii Preface 

No man sees the whole circle. But if each one 
sees his little arc of experience in right relation 
to the centre, he sees it as part of the truth. 

The false theories of the Atonement are 
those which claim to be final and exclusive. 
That claim breaks the line of curvature and 
conceals the true centre. 

The saving work of Jesus Christ for man as 
a sinner, — that is what the Atonement means 
to us. I think it surpasses all explanations of 
it, just as life is more than biology. 

HENRY VAN DYKE. 

The Brick Church Manse, 
New York City, 
February 28, 1899. 



CONTENTS 



OUAPTEK 


PAGK 


I. 


The Mist and the Gulf . 


1 


II. 


The Sin of the World 


11 




1. The Presence of Evil . 


14 




2. The Unanswerable Question . 


20 




3. The Sense of Sin .... 


29 




4. The Hopeful Fear .... 


36 


III. 


The Bible without Christ 


49 




1. The Unbroken Shadow . 


54 




2. The IntoleraUe Light . 


67 


IV. 


Christ's Mission to the Inner Life 


87 




1. The Kingdom is within You . 


90 




2. The Picture of Jesus in the Soul . 


96 




3. Peace with God through Christ 


101 




4. Newness of Life .... 


119 


V. 


The Perfection of Atonement 


129 




1. The Love that meets All Needs 


142 




2. The Love that passeth Knoioledge . 


156 


YI. 


The Message of the Cross 


169 



I 

THE MIST AND THE GULP 



Tho' Sin too oft, when smitten by Thy rod, 
Rail at ' Blind Fate ' with many a vain ' Alas ! ' 
From sin through sorrow into Thee we pass 
By that same path our true forefathers trod ; 
And let not Reason fail me, nor the sod 
Draw from my death Thy living flower and grass, 
Before I learn that Love, which is, and was, 
My Father, and my Brother, and my God. 

— Alfred Tennyson, DouUand Prayer. 



THE MIST AND THE GULF 

Doubt is the blinding mist that rises between Doubt and 
man's spiritual vision and the eternal truth. **^- 

Sin is the great gulf that separates man's 
moral character from the divine ideal. 

The mists gather, and thicken, and melt, and 
disperse. The gulf is always there. Ages of 
doubt come and go, in an abiding world of sin. 

The pain of doubt is an evidence that man 
was made for faith. The shame of sin is an 
evidence that man was created for holiness. 

A gospel for humanity must be good news Asympa- 
both for doubters and for sinners. The depth ^^^^^<^ dospei. 
of its sympathy will always be the measure of 
its power. 

It must not condemn doubt as if it were a 
sin : neither must it deny sin as if it were 
merely an illusion of doubt. 

To doubting men and to sinful men it must 
speak the message of a divine love, — a reveal- 
ing love that pierces the mist with rays of 
light and brings clearness and joy to the con- 
3 



transient. 



4 The Mist and the Grulf 

fused and darkened spirit, — a redeeming love 
that bridges the gulf of separation and leads 
the guilty conscience back into peace and har- 
mony with God. 

Doubt is An age of doubt is a transient phase of a sin- 

ful world. There is always some doubt in the 
world, just as there is always some moisture in 
the air. At certain times and in certain places 
this moisture is increased and rolls together in 
gray mist and clinging fog. 

There are certain stages and conditions of 
human thought in which the difficulties of be- 
lieving in a spiritual world are multiplied and 
grow more dense and impenetrable. The soul 
of man seems to be shut in by a narrower hori- 
zon. Things that are near loom larger in the 
mist. Things that are far are lost to view. 
The atmosphere in which the spirit moves is 
heavy and bewildering. Men are confused, 
hesitating, questioning, despondent, in regard 
to all that lies beyond the reach of the senses. 
Doubt, always present though diffused, becomes 
so thick and pressing, that it overshadows the 



Through such an age I think we have been 
passing, in this latter half of the nineteenth 
century. Of the intellectual causes which have 



The Mist and the Grulf 6 

led to this increase of doubt ; of the qualities 
which characterize it, — .qualities for the most 
part sympathetic and hopeful, — its reverence 
for the questioned faith, its deep unrest and 
sorrow, its loyalty to ethical ideals ; and of 
the gospel which it needs, the gospel of the 
personal Christ clearly revealing the reality 
and fatherhood of God, the liberty and re- 
sponsibility of man, and the immortality of 
the soul, — of these things I have written in 
a former book. 

But such a presentation of the gospel, from 
the point of view of a particular age, and with ^ 
the purpose of meeting certain intellectual 
needs, certain urgent questionings of the 
human spirit, could not be (and indeed it was 
not intended to be) complete and sufficient. 
Man has other needs than those of the intel- 
lect. After the question of the reality of God 
is answered, then remains the question of our 
personal relation to Him. 

The age of doubt will pass, is already pass- The dissolv- 
ing, and we are entering, if the signs of the ^^9 of doubt. 
times fail not, upon a new era of faith. 

There is a renaissance of religion. Spiritual 
instincts and cravings assert themselves and 
demand their rights. The loftier aspirations, 
the larger hopes of mankind, are leading the 



6 The Mist and the Q-ulf 

new generation forward into the twentieth 
century as men who advance to a noble con- 
flict and a glorious triumph, under the cap- 
taincy of the Christ that was and is to be. 
The educated youth of to-day are turning with 
a mighty, world-wide movement toward the 
banner of a militant, expectant, imperial 
Christianity. The discoveries of science, once 
deemed hostile and threatening to religion, are 
in process of swift transformation into the 
materials of a new defence of the faith. The 
achievements of commerce and social organiza- 
tion have made new and broad highways around 
the world for the onward march of the believ- 
ing host. Already we can discern the bright- 
ness of another great age of faith. 
When doubt But an age of faith, when the mist of doubt 
dissolves, ^g dissolved and driven away, is always the time 

sm IS made "^ "^ ^ 

clear. when the gulf of sin is most clearly visible. 

The souls that are most sure of the reality of 

God and the future life are always those that 

feel most deeply their separation from Him and 

their guilty uncleanness in His sight. The evil 

that is in their own hearts presses upon them 

more heavily, the more vividly they realize the 

actual existence of the spiritual realm and its 

eternal significance. The evil that is in the 

world does not disappear nor change, through 



The Mist and the Grulf 7 

all the coming and going, the darkening and Sin also 
dissolving of human doubts in regard to its ^^^^^" 
origin, nature, and meaning. It remains an 
unalterable fact in human experience. The 
interpretation which religious faith gives to it 
intensifies the necessity of a divine salvation 
from it. 

Those who have accepted the gospel for an 
age of doubt are those who feel most keenly the 
need of the gospel for a world of sin. 

There cannot be two gospels. I do not believe The unity of 

that there is any essential difference or contra- ^i ^.^f^^ *^ 
•^ Christ. 

diction between the message which Christianity 
has for one age and that which it has for 
another. It is always the glad tidings of the 
personal Christ, the revealer of God and the 
Saviour of men. The application of this mes- 
sage is as wide and various as human need and 
longing, hope and fear, sorrow and sin. 

To those who are doubtful and confused, to 
those who have lost the sense of spiritual 
things, the divine voice says, " This is my be- 
loved Son; hear him."^ 

To those who are sinful and sorrowful, upon 
whom the sense of evil rests like an intolera- 
ble burden, the voice says, "Behold the Lamb 

1 Luke ix. 35. 



8 



The Mist and the Q-ulf 



Christ the 
Revealer is 
Christ the 
Saviour. 



Companion 
volumes. 



of God, which taketh away the sin of the 
world."! 

These two elements of the gospel are inter- 
woven and inseparable. Christ could not take 
away the sin of the world unless He were the 
Son of God. Christ would not be the divine 
Saviour unless He took away the sin of the 
world. 

In trying to set forth the personal Christ as 
God's answer to the doubts and questionings 
of this age, I could not help speaking of Him 
as the deliverer from sin.^ Nor will it be pos- 
sible to present His sacrifice on the cross as the 
world's redemption without confessing a con- 
stant faith in Him as God manifest in the flesh. 

Indeed, this second book is written chiefly 
because I feel the need of a fuller utterance 
to complete the message of the former book. 
I would have the two books stand together 
and interpret each other. They are but win- 
dows looking toward Christ from two differ- 
ent points of view. 

The message of the first book was this : 
Christ saves us from doubt, because He is the 
revelation of God. 

The message of the second book is this : 

1 John i. 29. 

2 The Gospel for an Age of Doubt, pp. 75 ff., 162 ff. 



The Mist and the Crulf 9 

Christ is the revelation of God, because He 
saves us from sin. 

Many of the men and women whom the The 
preacher meets to-day are or have been doubt- ^^^^^^^ * 
ers. All are sinners. He must speak out of 
his own heart to theirs. His word must have 
the comfort which can only come from one who 
has been comforted, the peace which can only 
be declared by one who has sought and found 
it in the experience of reconciliation with God, 
the sympathetic power which can only flow 
from one who knows both the burden of in- 
iquity and the blessedness of forgiveness 
through Christ. 

The gospel for a world of sin cannot be 
preached by any except those who need it for 
themselves. An angel could not deliver it 
aright. Its language is always in the first per- 
son plural, drawing the speaker and the hearers 
into a brotherhood of penitence and forgive- 
ness. 

" God commendeth his love toward ws, in 
that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died 
for -MS."! 

Christ Himself did not come to preach this 
gospel. 

1 Komans v. 8. 



10 The Mist and the Gulf 

He came to live it. 

It was when the Apostles Peter and Paul 
and John had seen Him delivered for their 
offences and raised again for their justifica- 
tion that they began to understand and preach 
this gospel for a world of sin. Ever since it 
has had but one message. 

" Through Ms name whosoever helieveth in him 
shall receive remission of sms."^ 

" Grod was in Christ reconciling the world unto 
himself.''^ ^ 

'''If any man sin, we have an advocate with the 
Father, Jesus Christ the righteous : and he is the 
propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, 
hut also for the sins of the whole world.''^^ 

1 Acts X. 43. 2 2 Cor. ii. 19. 3 i John ii. 1, 2. 



II 

THE SIN OF THE WOELD 



Judge me not as I judge myself, O Lord ! 

Show me some mercy, or I may not live : 
Let the good in me go without reward ; 

Forgive the evil I must not forgive. 

— William Dean Howells, Conscience. 



II 

THE SIN OF THE WORLD 

The sins of the world are many. The sin of The soUdar- 
the world is one. Uyofsm. 

It is like the grass of the field. Below the 
separate shoots and blades, which stand up in- 
dividual and distinct, as if each one grew by 
itself, there is a network of branching roots 
and fibres, knotted together, interwoven, tena- 
cious, spreading far, and propagating itself 
more swiftly the more it is cut and divided. 
The separation is on the surface. The unity is 
underground. 

But before we can have any idea of what sin 
means, either separately in the individual or 
collectively in the race, we must give some 
thought to the problem of evil, starting not 
from the point of view of philosophy, but from 
the point of view of experience, 
13 



14 The Sin of the World 



The Presence of Evil 

The hidden Beneath all the particular forms of evil that 
^^^^' exist in the world, men have always recognized 

a common ground of evil in human nature. 
Something has happened to the race, some- 
thing has entered into it and taken possession 
of its vital powers, which makes it bring forth 
bad fruit. This is not a theory. It is a fact. 

The experience of mankind, thus far, is a 
mass of cumulative evidence that there is a 
radical twist in humanity which runs through 
it from top to bottom, and produces crooked 
results in every sphere of human life. So far 
as we can judge by our own experience, and 
by observation of others, every child of man 
who comes to moral consciousness, comes not 
only with a freedom of will which makes the 
choice of evil possible, but also with a pro- 
pensity which makes such a choice probable. 
This probability is so strong that we always 
reckon with it, in dealing with ourselves or 
with others. 

No man gets fairly started in the journey of 
life without knowing that he has a tendency to 
go wrong. It is the folly of the fool that he 



The Sin of the World 15 

forgets it. The wise man remembers, fears, 
and tries to guard against it. 

Human society is organized around two facts: Society on 
the desire of good and the recognition of evil. ^^^^^• 
Every institution in the world which is of any 
value has in it a defensive, corrective, punitory 
side, which is an unconscious confession that 
mankind is prone to do wrong. Men take this 
for granted in all the relations of life. Whether 
they are making systems of education or of 
government, whether they are devising enter- 
prises to increase their property, or laws to 
protect it, or wills to distribute it, they always 
take into account the fact that there is a strain 
of evil running through all humanity. 

The advance of modern science and philos- Thewam- 
ophy has not reduced or weakened the evidence '^^'9 of pht- 

^ "^ ^ losophy, 

of this common ground of evil in the world. 
On the contrary, it has done much to deepen 
and intensify the conviction that there is a rad- 
ical twist in human nature. The easy-going 
and' superficial optimism of the eighteenth cen- 
tury is thoroughly discredited and obsolete. 
Men have turned away from Rousseau's skin- 
deep philosophy of the " original goodness and 
unlimited perfectibility" of human nature, to 
the profounder view of the Hebrew prophets, 
the Greek dramatists, Dante's Divine Comedy, 



16 The Sin of the World 

Shakespeare's Hamlet^ Tennyson's Idylh of 
the King^ the great poetry of all lands and 
ages, — the clearer, deeper, sadder view, which 
sees the mysterious shadow resting on the life 
of man, and traces the lines of conflict, disaster, 
and death that run through human history, 
back to their origin in the gulf which separates 
man's moral character from the divine ideal. 
The testi- Science, with its new theory of evolution, 

mony of p^^g ^ stern emphasis upon the strength of the 
ties which bind man to the brute. It lays bare 
the workings of the selfish, sensual, egotistical 
impulses in the career of the race. It lengthens 
the cords and strengthens the stakes of the 
fatal net of heredity which holds all men to- 
gether in an entanglement of defects of nature 
and taints of blood. 

" I know of no study," wrote Professor Hux- 
ley, " which is so unutterably saddening as that 
of the evolution of humanity as set forth in the 
annals of history. Out of the darkness of pre- 
historic ages man emerges with the marks of his 
lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, 
only more intelligent than the other brutes; 
a blind prey to impulses which as often as not 
lead him to destruction ; a victim to endless 
illusions which make his mental existence a 
terror and a burden, and fill his physical life 



The Sin of the World 17 

with barren toil and battle. He attains a cer- 
tain degree of comfort, and develops a more 
or less workable theory of life in such favourable 
situations as the plains of Mesopotamia or of 
Egypt, and then for thousands and thousands 
of years struggles with various fortunes, at- 
tended by infinite wickedness, bloodshed, and 
misery, to maintain himself at this point against 
the greed and ambition of his fellow-men. He 
makes a point of killing and otherwise perse- 
cuting all those who first try to get him to 
move on ; and when he has moved a step 
farther he foolishly confers post-mortem deifi- 
cation on his victims. He exactly repeats the 
process with all who want to move a step yet 
farther."! 

This was written by a teacher of science, for 
a periodical called The Nineteenth Century, 
If it had been uttered by a Hebrew prophet, in 
the sixth century before Christ, it could not 
give a darker picture of human nature. 

Modern philosophy is permeated with the Pessimism 
flavour of pessimism, — the bitter tincture drawn ^A^";^^^^^ 
from the twisted, tangled roots of sorrowful 
perversity which underlie the life of man. 

Modern literature is haunted by the per- 
sistent spectre of evil, which "will not down." 

1 The Nineteenth Century, Feb., 1889. "Agnosticism." 
c 



18 The Sin of the World 

A novel by Zola, or Turgenieff, or Thomas 
Hardy, is little more than a commentary on 
Jeremiah's text, "The heart is deceitful above 
all things, and desperately wicked." ^ 

Gloomy as such a view of life is, unmitigated 
by any real explanation of its mysterious ail- 
ment, unillumined by any hope of its cure, 
there is still something wholesome and medici- 
nal in it. It is better to know the saddest 
truth than to be blinded by the merriest lie. 
The sober, stern-browed pessimism which looks 
the darkness in the face is sounder and more 
heroic than the frivolous, fat-witted optimism 
which turns its back, and shuts its eyes, and 
laughs. 
The folly of Man, indeed, is framed to live and rise by 
ignoring hope. But a hope which begins by denying the 
facts is a false hope whose path leads upward — 
a few steps — to the edge of a precipice of deeper 
despair. 

The Bridge-Builders in Rudyard Kipling's 
story would have been fools if they had tried 
to accomplish their work by ignoring the steady 
downward thrust of gravitation, or shutting 
their eyes to the destructive rage of the Ganges- 
flood. 

No less foolish is the man who tries to build 
1 Jer. xvii. 9. 



The Sin of the World 19 

a life, or a theory of life, in f orgetfulness of the 
steady downward thrust of human nature, or in 
denial of the reality and universality of the evil 
that is in the world. 

Hidden it may be ; dormant it may be ; un- 
realized it may be in the fulness of its possi- 
bilities and powers. The river sleeps in the 
smoothness of its flow. The force that draws 
all foreheads downward to the dust is checked 
and countervailed by other forces. But evil is 
always there, a potency of disaster and destruc- 
tion. All the ills that have been wrought in 
the world come from that secret source. In 
form they are manifold. In origin and essence 
they are one. 



20 The Sin of the World 

n 

The Unanswerable Question 

The genesis How came evil into being ? 
of evil. rpj^^g .g ^1^^ question which man has always 

asked, and to which he has never found a per- 
fect answer. 

He cannot help asking it, because curiosity, 
in the nobler sense of the word, is the main- 
spring of his mind. When man ceases to 
question he ceases to think. 

He cannot find the perfect answer, because his 
reason is limited and conditioned, and because 
his intellectual power itself has developed under 
the shadow, and within the sphere, of the very 
malign presence which he seeks to account for. 

A spirit whose life was beyond the influence 
of evil might be able to understand and solve 
the problem of its origin. But even so, it 
would hardly be possible for such a spirit to 
communicate this knowledge to other spirits 
who were born and lived within the domain 
of evil. 

And yet, that man should ask this question, 
and continue to ask it after thousands of years 
of baffled thought and disappointed search, is 
in itself a hopeful and illuminating fact. It 



The Sin of the World 21 

is a question which implies a faith not to be The ques- 
eradicated, a courage not to be conquered. It ^*°** of hope. 
speaks of a conviction that evil is not eternal, 
but temporal ; not sovereign, but subordinate ; 
not native to the universe, but a foreigner and 
an intruder. It testifies to man's knowledge 
that evil is not the whole, but a part ; not the 
straight line, but the deflection; not a neces- 
sary element in the perfect harmony of being, 
but a false note which breaks the chord. 

If man should ask, "How came good into 
being?" he would be in the region of despair. 
While he continues to ask, "How came evil 
into being ? " he is in the region of hope. 

All the answers to this question which have 
been attempted, may be classified under three 
forms. The first amounts to a denial of the 
existence of evil. The second destroys the re- 
ality of the distinction between evil and good. 
The third confesses that the primal origin of 
evil is a mystery, and bids us rest content with 
a knowledge of its reality and its mode of mani- 
festation in the world. 

All theories which are based upon the idea of is evil 
the essential nothingness of evil, amount to a ^^^ *^^ 
practical denial of its existence. Traces of 
such theories may be found even in Christian 



22 The Sin of the World 

writers. A theologian as orthodox as Thomas 
Aquinas has said, "God created everything 
that exists; but sin is nothing ; so God was not 
the author of it." In Robert Browning's poem 
of Aht Vogler, the idea is put into a single 
verse. 

^' The evil is naught, is null, is silence implying sound." 

Darkness is but the absence of light. Evil is 
but the negation of good. 

The rock upon which all these negative 
theories go to pieces is the practical convic- 
tion that evil is just as real to us in our ex- 
perience, just as solid, just as operative, as 
good is. The desire which seeks a wrong 
pleasure is no less vivid than that which 
seeks a right pleasure. The will which de- 
termines a wicked action is just as strong 
as that which determines a righteous action. 
The end sought is no more negative in one 
case than it is in the other. If evil is a 
nothing, it is a strangely active, positive, and 
potent nothing, with all the qualities of a 
something. The theories which attempt to 
account for its origin by tracing it to a mere 
negation or absence of good, raise a harder 
question than that which they attempt to 
answer. Instead of asking how evil came 



The Sin of the World 23 

into being, we must ask, How did evil, which 
is a mere nothing, come to have the reality, 
the life, and the power of a something? 

All theories which are based upon the idea of is evil 
the necessity of evil lead to a practical denial ^^^es^ary? 
of the distinction between evil and good. For 
if the necessity be purely natural, that is to 
say materialistic, then there is no possible 
ground for making such a distinction. The 
inexplicable constitution of the original atoms 
of the universe has produced mother's love and 
murderer's hate in precisely the same way, and 
the one is as good, or as evil, as the other. 
But if the necessity be ordained by any kind of 
a Divine Being, then all its results must be 
according to His will and must serve His pur- 
pose. Any essential difference between the 
evil and the good becomes unimaginable. All 
that is left is a formal difference, in which evil 
is good in disguise, a necessary but unrecognized 
element in the development of the world. We 
must accept the statement of Pope's Essay on 
Man: 

" All nature is but art, unknown to thee ; 
All chance, direction which thou canst not see ; 
All discord, harmony not understood ; 
All partial evil, universal good ; 



not. 



24 The Sin of the World 

And spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, 
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right." 

The "ought The rock upon which these theories of the 
necessity of evil go to pieces is the practical 
knowledge of the nature of evil, which comes 
to us through the same moral sense which 
makes us aware of its existence. There is ab- 
solutely no variation in the testimony of human 
consciousness on this point. Evil is recognized 
not merely as something which is, but also as 
something which " ought not to be. " This is the 
mark by which we know it. If from this mark 
we set out to trace its origin to a divine neces- 
sity which has ordained it and called it into 
being to serve a good purpose, then we must 
admit that our original mark of evil is an illu- 
sion, a false label. It is not " that which ought 
not to be." It is "that which ought to be." 
The whole problem of the origin of evil dis- 
solves into an absurdity. We are left to face 
a still harder question. How did our moral 
consciousness, with such an error at the very 
heart of it, come into being ? Is it a mistake ? 
Or is it a lie ? Or is it perhaps a divinely im- 
posed delusion ? ^ 

1 Schleiermacher and Ritschl, among theologians, present 
a theory of the sense of guilt as a purely subjective feeling, 



The Sin of the World 25 

But if our common sense turns away from The true 
these theories of evil as originating in nothing- .^^^ ^/ 
ness, or in necessity, in what direction shall we 
look for an answer to the question of how it 
came into being? There is only one line left 
open ; and that is the line of the facts as they 
lie before us in the world of experience. This 
is the line that we must take. We must hold 
to it firmly. We must follow it as far as we 
can ; and when we can follow it no farther we 
must stop, sure that to turn aside from that 
line is to fall into falsehood. 

What, then, are the facts of evil recognized Three facts 
by the moral sense of mankind ? First of all, 
that it is " that which ought not to be." Then, 
that it actually is. Then, that it manifests 
itself in our own experience in connection with 
voluntary acts, — acts of choice, or acts of com- 
pliance, — contrary to " that which ought to be." 
But " that which ought to be," must be the will 
of God. Therefore " that which ought not to 
be," can only make itself known in the world 
through the will of a creature capable of going 
contrary to God. The possibility of evil de- 
pends upon the liberty of the created will. 
Liberty, then, which means the power of con- 

whicli makes it amount, in effect, to a result of ignorance, 
or an illusion ordained by God for a good end. 



26 



The Sin of the World 



The dark- 



ness 
the door. 



Evil is 
choice 
abused. 



trary choice, must be the door through which 
evil entered the world.^ 

But what lies behind that door ? From what 
secret region does the evil that passes through 
it draw its birth and its power ? Why does it 
enter in? Why does God permit it? Here 
we stand face to face with the impenetrable 
mystery. 

Certainly God as creator must have bestowed 
the gift of liberty with a good purpose. He 
must have intended man to choose the good in 
order to attain real and permanent freedom ; 
that is, the power of self-realization in harmony 
with the ideal of his nature. But when evil 
comes in through liberty, the purpose of liberty 
is violated, the very end of its being is frus- 
trated. The will, choosing evil, comes into 
subjection to it, and cannot realize itself in 
a lasting freedom of concord with good. 

Evil, then, as it manifests itself in the world, 
is a purposeless, aimless thing. It is an abuse 
of the power of choice. It is caprice. It is 
violence to reason. We can give no rational 
explanation of its origin, because its origin 
appears irrational. It is incomprehensible. 
There is a madness about it which confuses 
the mind. The Greeks took refuge from it 

^ The Gospel for an Age of Doubt, ch. vi., "Liberty." 



The Sin of the World 27 

in their myth of Ate, " the eldest daughter of 
Zeus, the power of bane, who blindeth all." 
But this was only a shift of desperate igno- 
rance to get rid of the difficulty by transferring 
it from the human to the divine. 

A wiser, humbler, more reverent thought It does not 

holds fast to the conviction that wherever the ^^"^ff^^^ 

God. 

madness of evil comes from, it does not come 
from God. Its origin is beyond our ken. "Evil 
is the inscrutable mystery of the world ; it ever 
remains, in its inmost depths, impenetrable 
darkness." ^ It is not to be comprehended in 
its cause. It is to be known in its effects, which 
are symptoms of its nature. 

This is the point to which our line leads us, its Mrth- 
and here it leaves us. To go farther is to ^^^^^^ 
abandon fact for fancy. Christianity itself does 
not profess to give us light beyond this point. 
It presents no doctrine of the origin of evil. 
It tells us only how it came into the world, and 
what it means in the life of man. Where it 
came from is unrevealed. 

There are two places in the Bible where the Adam 
entrance of evil and the fall of man are de- ^fjf^^^^ 
scribed — and they both teach the same lesson. 
Christ's parable of the Prodigal Son 2 is just as 

1 Miiller, On the Christian Doctrine of Sin, II., p. 174. 

2 Luke XV. 



28 The Sin of tie World 

true, just as significant, as the story of Adam's 
lost Paradise.-^ In both stories the birthplace of 
the evil is hidden. The serpent that tempted 
Eve, and the far country that allured the Prodi- 
gal, are symbols of a mystery. In both stories 
the entrance of the evil is through self-will — 
blind, perverse, ruinous, but free, and therefore 
responsible. In both stories the nature of the 
evil is rebellion, self-injury, separation from 
God. 2 In both stories the result of the evil in 
man's heart is the sense of sin. 

Adam's story stops there ; but the Prodigal's 
story goes on to salvation. 

1 Gen. iii. 

2 The Gospel for an Age of Doubt, pp. 266 ff. 



The Sin of the World 29 

in 

The Sense of Sin 
The sense of sin is something deeper than the Sin is an 

J. -1 1 IT* M • 1 1 interpreta- 

consciousness oi evii.^ i^vii is a broad, vague no^ of evil 
word. It covers all that ought not to be, but it 
does not make clear the nature of the " ought 
not." It is a general description of that which 
prevents perfection, destroys happiness, pro- 
duces discord and misery. 

Sin is a precise, sharp word. It translates 
the idea of evil from the language of philosophy 
into the language of religion. It defines the 
nature of the "ought not" as resting on a 
divine law. It recognizes the presence and 
the guilt of a contrary will in disobedience to 
that law. It interprets the nature and the 
consequence of evil in the light that comes 
from God. 

The consciousness of evil is universal. There The unrest 
is a feeling of conflict, of disorder, of moral «/^«^^^^^- 
perturbation and unrest, diffused through all 
humanity. This is the great mark of division 
between the life of man and the life of nature. 
Emerson has described it in his poem of The 

1 Fairbairn, The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 
p. 462. 



30 The Sin of the World 

Sphinx. Nature is harmonious, joyful, uncon- 
scious of strife between the real and the 
ideal. 

" But man crouches and blushes, 

Absconds and conceals ; 
He creepeth and peepeth, 

He palters and steals ; 
Infirm, melancholy. 

Jealous glancing around, 
An oaf, an accomplice, 

He poisons the ground. 

" Out spoke the great mother. 

Beholding his fear ; — 
At the sound of her accents 

Cold shuddered the sphere ; 
* Who has drugged my boy's cup ? 

Who has mixed my boy's bread ? 
Who, with sadness and madness, 

Has turned my child's head ? ' " 

Conscience. This mysterious unrest, this vague trouble, 
this nameless, haunting distress, is an utter- 
ance of man's consciousness that he belongs 
to another world from that which is ruled 
by mere necessity. It is an instinctive con- 
fession that beyond the power of control, to 
which all physical life is subject, he feels a 
power of command, to which his spiritual life 
ought to be subject. This power of command 
makes itself known to him through conscience, 
which is the power of perceiving the differ- 



The Sin of the World 31 

ence between the " ought to be " and the 

"ought not to be." 

"Whom do you count the worst man upon 

earth ? " says Robert Browning in Christmas 

Uve. 

" Be sure that he knows, in his conscience, more 
Of what right is, than arises at bkth 
In the best man's acts that we bow before : 
This last knows better — true, but my fact is, 
'Tis one thing to know, and another to practise." 

This contrast between knowledge and prac- 
tice is the root of the consciousness of evil, 
whose symptoms are unrest, shame, and fear. 

" Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all." 

It is a feeling of resistance to a moral pres- 
sure, of disobedience to a commanding power, 
of discord with a dim ideal. But it is also a 
sense of compliance with an inward impulse, of 
obedience to a native desire, of agreement with 
a secret passion. 

It is not altogether dark. It could not exist The light 
in a world where there was nothing but evil. 
In a universe wholly material there could be 
no materialism. In a race utterly and totally 
evil there could be no consciousness of evil. 

Neither could it exist in a world where sepa- 
rate evils stood alone and had no common 



behind con- 
science. 



\ 

\ 



32 The Sin of the World 

ground in human nature. Each misdeed would 
then be a miracle. It would be a rootless, un- 
recognizable, nameless thing. Conscience per- 
ceives evil not only in its individuality, but 
also in its solidarity. When a man does wrong 
he feels that he is a partner in a great con- 
spiracy, a sharer, by choice or by compliance, 
in a widespread rebellion. 

" There is in man," wrote Frederic Amiel in 
his diary, "an instinct of revolt, an enemy of 
all law, a rebel which will stoop to no yoke, not 
even that of reason, duty, and wisdom. This 
element in us is the root of all sin — das radi- 
cale Bose of Kant."^ 
ithurieVs But this feeling of radical evil and of its 

presence and potency in every misdeed, needs 
more light to make its meaning clear. Evil is 
known as sin only when good is known as the 
will and command and ideal of a personal and 
holy God. 

This is what St. Paul teaches. Revelation 
is given to make clear the nature of the gulf 
between man as he is and man as he ought 
to be. Evil is not a step in a progress toward 
the ideal. It is a chasm which cuts us off 
from the ideal. The reason why it cuts us off 
is because it is contrary to God's will, through 

1 Amiel's Journal, 23d Feb., 1870, Vol. II., p. 55. 



spear. 



The Sin of the World 33 

which alone the ideal can be realized. The 
moral law reveals that will to us as positive, 
personal, righteous, and immutable. The law 
enters that the offence may abound, for "by 
the law is the knowledge of sin."^ 

The sense of sin, therefore, is a step beyond 
the consciousness of evil. And it is a step 
toward light. 

It is the interpretalion of evil as an offence sin against 
against God, a disobedience to God, a separa- ^^^• 
tion from God. It comes into being only with 
Theism, the faith in a holy, wise, and right- 
eous Spirit as creator of the world. It is not 
until this light breaks upon the soul that 
Amiel's words become true : "All men long 
to recover a lost harmony with the great order 
of things, and to feel themselves approved and 
blessed by the author of the Universe. All 
know what suffering is, and long for happiness. 
All know what sin is, and feel the need of 
pardon." 

Religion must begin, then, — even if we hold 
that its ultimate aim is the deliverance of men 
from evil, — religion must begin not with a 
doctrine of evil, but with a doctrine of God.^ 

Its keynote must be the first article of the 

1 Kom. iii. 20 ; v. 20. 

2 The Gospel for an Age of Doubt, Preface to 6th ed. 



34 The Sin of the World 

creed, " I believe in God, the Father Almighty, 
maker of heaven and earth." When He is 
hidden, forgotten, denied, the gospel for an age 
of doubt must prepare the way for the gospel 
for a world of sin. Over the vague unrest, the 
inarticulate shame, the uncomprehended fear, 
of an evil world, the light of God's love and 
God's law must be poured. Thus only can the 
evil doer find his way to that place of peni- 
tence, where he cries, "Against thee, thee 
only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy 
sight."! 
The light The scnsc of sin, therefore, is not by any 

beyond the j^Q^kiiB a hopeless thing. It is an evidence of 
life, in its very pain ; of enlightenment, in its 
very shame ; of nearness to God, in its very 
humiliation before Him. 

There is a passage in a recent story of human 
life that puts the truth very simply and beauti- 
fully. ^ A woman that was a sinner has come 
to a minister of Christ to confess her sin. The 
old man speaks to her as she kneels at his feet, 
weeping. 

" You have sinned, and suffered for your sin. 
You have asked your Heavenly Father to for- 
give you, and He has forgiven you. But still 

1 Psalm li. 4. 

2 Margaret Deland, Old Chester Tales, p. 84. 



The Sin of the World 35 

you suffer. Woman, be thankful that you can 
suffer. The worst trouble in the world is the 
trouble that does not know God, and so does 
not suffer. Without such knowledge there is 
no suffering. The sense of sin in the soul is the 
apprehension of Almighty God." 



36 The Sin of the World 

TV 

The Hopeful Fear 

Sin a Sin is not a thing to be defined. It is a 

mystery. thing to be felt. Every attempt at a definition 
comes short of the reality. If it is insisted 
upon as the full truth, it becomes a guide to 
error. Every genuine feeling of sin throws 
some light upon the reality and helps us to 
perceive that which we can never explain. 

One of the inexplicable elements of sin is the 
connection between its root in the race and its 
fruits in the individual. We cannot explain 
how it is that each man should feel himself 
free enough to be fully responsible for his own 
evil thoughts and feelings and actions, and yet 
conscious at the same time that they are joined 
to a common ground of evil in human nature. 
Stranger still is the fact that this propensity 
to evil is felt to be not an excuse but an aggra- 
vation. The man who injures his brother in 
a fit of passion, takes no comfort in the remem- 
brance of his anger. The anger itself is part 
of his condemnation. Who ever excused a foul 
deed, to his own conscience, with the saying 
that he had a foul nature ? Sin is not only an 
act : it is a condition, a state ; and separate 



The Sin of the World 37 

sins are not better, they are worse, because 
they spring from a common root. "It is of 
sin," says Boetius, "that we do not love that 
which is best." 

Christ taught the truth of original sin. He Original 
did not explain it, but He declared it when He ^^* 
said, " Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, 
murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false 
witness, blasphemies." ^ Side by side with this 
truth He proclaimed the guilt of actual sin 
when He said, " Whosoever looketh on a woman 
to lust after her hath committed adultery with 
her already in his heart." ^ He taught also that 
all men need to be delivered from both original 
and actual sin when He said, " Ye must be born 
again," ^ and " Except ye repent ye shall all like- 
wise perish."* But when His disciples pressed 
Him to explain this mystery of the connection 
between the root and the fruit of evil, with 
their question, " Lord, who did sin, this man or 
his parents, that he was born blind ? " Christ 
refused to answer them. He said, " Neither did 
this man sin nor his parents " (that is, in rela- 
tion to the point of their question), "but that the 
works of God might be made manifest in him." ^ 

Original sin makes originality in sins impos- 

1 Matt. XV. 19. 2 Matt. v. 28. 

3 John iii. 7. * Luke xiii. 3. 6 John ix. 2, 3. 



38 The Sin of the World 

sible. There is a fatal resemblance and rela- 
tionship in all the evils that are done under 
the sun, from the days before the flood even 
until now. 

And yet every sin originates in the heart that 
commits it. Each individual will that consents 
to evil chooses for itself. The ground of this 
choice is hidden in darkness. It may lie in a 
region beyond the sphere of time and space, an 
antenatal state.^ 
Evenjsina g^^t the operation of this choice is manifest 

fall of man. . ,, ,. , , -r, . . j? n x 

m the light. Every sm is a tall oi man. 

To be really conscious of a single sin is to 
feel its secret connections and infinite possibili- 
ties. It is to catch sight of the bottomless 
gulf and have a sense of the immeasurable 
peril of walking beside it with unguarded 
feet. 

In Goethe's Confessions of a Beautiful 
Soul there is a singular and searching pas- 
sage which goes very deep into human experi- 
ence. 

" For more than a year," — so runs the con- 
fession, — "I was forced to feel that if an un- 
seen Hand had not protected me, I might have 
become a Girard, a Cartouche, a Damiens, or 

1 Coleridge, Aids to Beflection, pp. 268 ff. ; Miiller, On the 
Christian Doctrine of iSi7i, II., pp. 357 ff. 



The Sin of the World 39 

almost any moral monster that one can name. 
I felt the predisposition to it in my heart. 
God, what a discovery I " ^ 

John Bunyan's exclamation, when he looked 
from his window at a condemned malefactor 
going to execution, — " There goes John Bun- 
yan, but for the grace of God," — has found an 
echo in many a heart. But this echo is not a 
defence ; it is a confession. 

The sense of sin covers character as well as Sinful 
deeds. It clings not only to what we have ^^<^*'«c^«^- 
done, but also to what we are prone to do. 
It was in this region below the surface that 
Jesus touched and exposed it, with His search- 
ing tenderness. His holy insight. His relentless 
love. Not only His word, piercing like an 
arrow of light to the roots of evil in pride 
and selfishness and lust and greed and hypoc- 
risy, but also His life, in its stainless purity 
and flawless truth, was an infallible detective 
of the furtive evil seeking to hide itself, like 
Adam and Eve in the story of Eden, among 
the trees of the garden. It was for this rea- 
son that the Scribes and Pharisees hated Him, 
because He made them hate themselves. It 
was for this reason that Peter feared to be 
with Him, and cried, " Depart from me, for 

1 Wilhelm Meister^s Lehrjahre, Part II., p. 112. 



40 The Sin of the World 

I am a sinful man, O Lord.''^ It was for this 
reason that the woman of the city streets drew 
close to Him, and bathed His feet with her 
tears, because she knew that He knew that she 
was a sinner.2 

There are four elements in a true sense of 
sin : shame, pain, fear, and hope. 
The shame The shame comes from its ugliness, its defile- 
m sm. ment, its marring and mocking of those ele- 

ments in us which we feel belong to the divine 
image and our better nature. No man is born 
without an ideal. 

" Take all in a word : the truth in God's breast, 
Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed : 
Though He is so bright, and we so dim, 
We are made in His image to witness Him." » 

The failure to be true to this ideal, the be- 
fouling and breaking of this image, is the 
shame of sin. 
The pain in The pain comes from its enslaving and im- 
prisoning power. Man was made for liberty. 
But sin is bondage to evil. "Whoso com- 
mitteth sin is the servant of sin."* The con- 
flict within our members, the law of the flesh 

1 Luke V. 8. 8 Browning, Christmas Eve, xvii. 

2 Luke vii. 38. * John viii. 34. 



sm. 



The Sin of the World 41 

warring against the law of the spirit, the weighji^ 
of the chains of evil habit, the tyranny of 
sensual lusts and passions, — these make the 
misery of human life. Stevenson's parable of 
Br. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a commentary 
on the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the 
Romans. 

" The gods are just;, and of our pleasant vices 
Make instruments to plague us." 

"Crime and punishment," says Emerson, 
" grow out of one stem. Punishment is a 
fruit that, unsuspected, ripens within the flower 
that concealed it." 

The fear comes from the sense of disobedi- The fear in 
ence to a high, mysterious, inexorable com- *"*" 
mand. It is not possible to feel sin without 
fear, except by denying the existence of all 
moral law. As a matter of fact, the con- 
sciousness of evil has always carried with it 
in all human experience a feeling of secret 
apprehension, a troubled expectation and dread 
of punishment. Fear is related to guilt as 
personality is related to law. The reality of 
the one relation carries with it the reality of 
the other. Here we come face to face with a 
crucial question in religion. 

Is there anything objective and actual which 



42 



The Sin of the World 



The warn- 
ing of con- 
science. 



The broken 
law. 



corresponds to this human element of fear in the 
sense of sin ? Is there anything for sinful man 
to be afraid of ? 

Certainly there must be, unless the whole 
testimony of our moral nature is an illusion. 
The condemnation of sin rests not merely upon 
the feeling that sin is self-injury, self-mutila- 
tion, but upon the deeper sense that it is an 
offence against a law outside of us, and above 
us, and justly sovereign over us.^ Such a 
law must have within itself the right, the 
power, the inexorable necessity of punishment. 
Resting upon the will, and expressing the char- 
acter of a righteous God, the ruler of the uni- 
verse, it implies in Him a holy indignation 
against all that breaks and dishonours it. 

"For consider," says one of the greatest 
preachers whose voice has been heard in the 
nineteenth century, "sin violates and defies 
the Moral Law of God. And what is God's 
Moral Law ? Is it a law which, like the laws 
of nature, as we call them, might conceivably 
have been other than it is? Certainly not. 
We can conceive much in nature being very 
different from what it is — suns and stars mov- 
ing in smaller cycles; men and animals in 
different shapes; the chemistry, the geology, 
'^ Lux Mundi, p. 277. 



The World of Sin 43 

the governing rules of the material universe, 
quite unlike what they actually are. God's 
liberty in creating physical beings was in no 
way limited by His own laws, whether of force 
or of matter. But can we, if we believe in a 
Moral God, conceive Him saying, ' Thou mayest 
lie,' ' Thou mayest do murder ' ? . . . The 
Moral Law is not a code which He might have 
made other than it is ; it is His own Moral 
Nature, thrown into a shape which makes it 
intelligible and applicable to us His creatures ; 
and therefore in violating it we are opposing, 
not something which He has made, but might 
have made otherwise, like the laws of nature, — 
but Himself. Sin, if it could, would destroy 
God." 1 

The penalty of sin under moral law is not The penalty. 
less certain, but more certain, than the penalty 
of disobedience to natural law. The whole- 
some fear which makes a burnt child dread the 
fire is no more trustworthy than the salutary 
fear which makes a sinful man dread the divine 
indignation. Both are premonitions of an 
actual peril, safeguards against a real danger. 
But the latter, if Christ knew the truth, is far 
more needful, far more terrible. For he said : 
" Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and 

1 Henry Parry Liddon, Passiontide Sermons, p. 296. 



44 The Sin of the World 

after that have no more than they can do. 
But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear : 
Fear him, which after he hath killed, hath 
power to cast into hell ; yea, I say unto you, 
fear him."i And this He said, not unto His 
enemies to terrify them, but unto His friends 
to warn and save them. 

The wrath The fear that lurks in sin is not an illusion. 

^■^ ^ ' It is an admonition. It corresponds to some- 
thing real outside of us. And that something 
is the reality which religion calls "the wrath 
of God." 

It is inconceivable that this holy wrath should 
be perfectly comprehended or explained by us. 
It is equally inconceivable that it should be 
doubted or denied. A righteous judge incapa- 
ble of indignation against crime would be unfit 
to sit in the seat of justice. A holy God in- 
capable of wrath against sin would be disquali- 
fied to rule the world. 

There must be a moral necessity in God which 
calls for the condemnation of evil as sin. This 
necessity comes from every side of His nature, 
— from His justice first, but also from His 
purity, His wisdom, His goodness. His love. 
And the condemnation expresses every side of 
His relation to the world. As Creator, He dis- 

1 Luke xii. 5. 



The Sin of the World 45 

approves the marring of the ideal. As Judge, 
He condemns the transgression of the law. As 
Lord, He resents and reproves treason and rebel- 
lion against His government. As Father, He 
is wounded and offended by ingratitude against 
His love and separation from His fellowship. 
All these holy perfections are included and im- 
plied in that mysterious reality of which the 
Scripture speaks as " the wrath of God, coming 
upon the children of disobedience." ^ 

But there is a form in which this truth of A false 
the divine wrath has been presented which ^^^^^*^''' 
makes it utterly hateful, and, indeed, incred- 
ible. It is the form which forgets and denies 
those perfections of God out of which His 
indignation proceeds. It is the form which 
introduces sin itself into the very heart of 
God's feeling against sin. It is the form which 
makes Him fierce, vindictive, implacable, and 
cruel. 

To defame and dishonour the divine wrath 
is worse than to doubt or deny it. 

To separate God's indignation against sin 
from His love toward man is to blaspheme His 
name. 

This is the fault of which, alas, human theol- 
ogy has too often been guilty, — a fault which 

lEph. V. 6. 



46 The Sin of the World 

has brought its own deep punishment in the 
revolt of human nature against the hideous mis- 
representation of religion. Take two examples 
of this black caricature of God's feeling toward 
sin, from the writings of Robert South, one of 
the most eloquent and eminent preachers of the 
seventeenth century. 
Qo^ " The same relation of a Creator that endears 

slandered. Qod to the innocent, fires Him against a sin- 
ner. God looks upon the soul as Amnon did 
upon Tamar : while it was a virgin He loved 
it ; but now it is deflowered he hates it." 

" A physician has a servant ; while this ser- 
vant lives honestly with him he is fit to be 
used and to be employed in his occasions ; but 
if this servant should commit a felony and for 
that be condemned, he can then be actively 
serviceable to him no longer ; he is fit only for 
him to dissect, and make an object upon which 
to show the experiments of his skill. So while 
man was yet innocent he was fit to be used by 
God in a way of active obedience; but now 
having sinned, and being sentenced by the law 
to death as a malefactor, he is a fit matter only 
for God to torment and show the wonders of 
His vindictive justice." 

The world is to be congratulated that such 
teaching as this has become obsolete and in- 



The Sin of the World 47 

credible. Whatever system of theology it may 
have belonged to, is now as dead as Dagon. 
A God who had any resemblance in His char- 
acter to that vilest and most despicable sinner, 
Amnon, a God who could use His children, 
even after they had disobeyed Him, as "fit 
matter to torment and show the wonders of 
His vindictive justice," would be a nightmare 
horror of moral monstrosity, infinitely worse 
than no God at all. To worship such a God 
would be to worship an omnipotent devil. 

God cannot be angry, even against sin, as sin- God's wrath 
ful men are ane^rv, because in Him there is no ^* ^^^^ "* 

° '^ His love. 

sin. Whatever His holy wrath against evil 
may mean, it certainly must be eternally con- 
sistent with His purity. His goodness, His 
compassion, and His love. 

Therefore, the true fear which is an element 
in the sense of sin, — the fear which is simply 
seeing what evil is, what judgment is, what 
law is, and what punishment is, — the fear 
which is reverent, sober, steadying, stimu- 
lating, healthful, — the fear which gives depth 
and grandeur to our conception of the world 
and enters mightily into every serious and 
noble life, — the fear which is not spiritual 
cowardice, but an incitement to courage, not 
abject superstition, but a reasonable awe,— 

/ 



48 The Sin of the World 

the fear which comes upon every sinful soul 
as an inflaence of quickening intelligence, a 
powerful movement of imperilled life, in the 
presence of the just and holy God, — this fear 
carries in its heart a secret and imperishable 
hope. 

The prodi- The hope that dwells in the sense of sin! 
gal says, Strange mystery of the deepest of all sorrows, — 
seed of light hidden in the womb of darkness, 
— indomitable testimony of the lost soul to its 
faith that some one is seeking for it in the 
wilderness ! 

Sin is the separation of man from God. 

The sense of sin is God's unbroken hold 
upon the heart of man. 

The sacrifices on myriad altars bear wit- 
ness to it. The prayers of penitence rising 
from all dark corners of the earth bear witness 
to it. The tremulous homeward-turnings of 
innumerable souls from far countries of misery 
and loneliness bear witness to it. 

" Father, I have sinned against heaven and 
in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be 
called thy son ! " 

But mark, — he still says. Father! 



Ill 

THE BIBLE WITHOUT CHEIST 



But were he man, 
And death ends all ; then was that tortured death 
On Calvary a thing to make the pulse 
Of memory quail and stop. 

— KiCHARD Watson Gilder, In Palestine. 
50 



need in the 
Bible. 



Ill 

THE BIBLE WITHOUT CHRIST 

The Bible, if indeed it be the true text-book what we 
of religion, must contain the answer to man's 
cry as a sinner to God as a Saviour. It must 
disclose to man a remedy for the pain, a conso- 
lation for the shame, a rescue from the fear, and 
a confirmation of the secret hope, that he dimly 
and confusedly feels in the sense of sin. A 
Bible with no message of deliverance from sin 
would be a useless luxury in a sinful world. It 
would lack that quality of perfect fitness to 
human need which is one of the most luminous 
evidences of a divine word. The presence of a 
clear message of salvation is an essential element 
in the proof of inspiration. 

That there is such a message of salvation in The word of 

the Bible, no intelligent reader can deny. That ^^^^ centres 

. ^, . . , , . , . . in Christ. 

it centres m Christ, is what this chapter is in- 
tended to show. 

Jesus Himself took this view of the Scrip- 
tures. To the unbelieving Jews, who trusted 
in their sacred books but felt no need of Him, 
61 



it be without 
Him? 



52 The Bible without Christ 

He said, " Searcli the Scriptures ; for in these 
ye think ye have eternal life : and they are they 
which testify of me."^ 
What would Suppose for a moment that this were a mis- 
take. Suppose that there were no testimonies 
to Christ in the Old Testament, no promises of 
His coming, no foreshadowings of His saving 
mission and power, — only law and ritual, poetry 
and history, philosophy and prophecy. 

Suppose also that the New Testament con- 
tained nothing but the record of the moral 
teachings of Jesus and His followers, without 
reference to His life and death as a visible 
revelation of divine justice and mercy in per- 
sonality and action. Suppose that it had not a 
word to say about His work in relation to men 
as sinners. Suppose, in short, that it gave the 
words of Jesus about the reality and nature and 
guilt of sin, about the pain and shame and fear 
of humanity, but no explanation of Him, no 
recognition of what He did and suffered, no 
view of His crucifixion and resurrection, in their 
bearing upon the sin of the world. 

Suppose the Bible without Christ. What hope 

of salvation would it contain? What would 

it be worth to us ? What would be left of it as 

the divine answer to the need of a sinful world ? 

1 John V. 39. 



The Bible without Christ 53 

In the Old Testament, with, its partial and 
imperfect vision of the nature of evil, an un- 
broken shadow. 

In the New Testament, with its poignant 
disclosure of the secret of sin, an intolerable 
light. 

We can never realize the true meaning and Theexpen- 
value of this book of the world's hope until we "^^^^' 
try the experiment of reading it without the 
message which makes it hopeful. How the 
Bible centres in Christ can be learned best by 
trying to take Christ out of the Bible. 



54 The Bible without Christ 



The Unbroken Shadow 

The pictures The Old Testament does not begin with a 
of Genesis, theory of the nature of God and the origin of 
evil. It begins with a picture of creation, 
followed immediately by a picture of the en- 
trance of evil into the world, and from this 
point it unrolls a graphic panorama of human 
life. 

Some people interpret this panorama of 
Genesis as a series of scientific diagrams. 
Others interpret it as a series of poetic illus- 
trations. It makes little difference in regard 
to their value for purposes of spiritual instruc- 
tion. Upon the whole, the vital truths by 
which the souls of men live, have been con- 
veyed in poetic illustrations rather more fre- 
quently and fully than in scientific diagrams. 
Dante's Divine Comedy has taught more than 
Euclid's Geometry. 
The vision One thing is clear in the book of Genesis. 
By whatever method we translate its records, 
their meaning is the same. They show a 
vision of human sin, conflict, and suffering, 
against a divine background of offended love, 
righteous indignation, and just retribution. 



a7id the 
background. 



The Bible without Christ 55 

This view of human life corresponds very 
closely with what we know of it from other 
sources. 

Unruly appetite, lustful passion, envy and 
discord, violence and terror and guilt, are 
written as clearly in the story of the begin- 
nings of all tribes and nations and families, 
as in the story of Adam and Eve, Cain and 
Abel, Noah, Abraham, and Jacob. 

It is difficult to conceive how a pure and God hates 
righteous God could look upon such a race, ^^i^^^^^^ 
made in His own image, with dominion over man. 
the creatures, and with capacities of infinite 
development in wisdom and virtue and power, 
yet descending to lower depths of animalism 
than the very beasts of the field, developing 
passions more cruel and treacherous and base 
than those of the brute creation, — upon such 
a race it is impossible that God should look 
without repulsion and holy wrath. Not wrath 
as we know it, always tainted with selfishness, 
but wrath as only God can know it, absolutely 
unselfish and springing out of frustrated 
benevolence. The more He loves men and 
women, the more He must hate the evil which 
mars His image in their characters and defeats 
His design in their lives. 

Now take away out of these pictures which 



56 The Bible without Christ 

The ray of are given in Genesis, that one ray of light 
scured. which flashes in the Messianic promise that the 

seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's 
head,i that one thread of gold which runs from 
this promise through the lives of those who 
believe in God, keeping them in touch with 
Him, making them His faithful seed, because 
from them there is to come a star, a sceptre, a 
Shiloh unto whom the nation shall be gathered,^ 

— take away that ray of light, that thread of 
gold, and what remains ? Sin and shame and 
struggle below; baffled love, frustrated benevo- 
lence, inevitable condemnation above. The 
expulsion from Eden — the thorn-cursed soil 

— the brand on the brow of Cain — the shat- 
tered Babel — the whelming flood — the fiery 
tempest on Sodom and Gomorrah — wars and 
disasters, tumults and captivities — man a re- 
bellious, wretched, wandering creature — God 
justly offended at the violation of His law — a 
sin- twisted, suffering, fearful world below — a 
stainless, silent heaven above, — and no bridge 
across the gulf. 

Sinai. Now turn to the law given through Moses. 

His part in history was twofold. He was 
the leader of the Exodus ; and that means 

1 Gen. iii. 15. 2 Qen. xlix. 10. 



The Bible without Christ 57 

emancipation from human tyranny. He was 
the explorer of Sinai ; and that means subjuga- 
tion to divine justice. 

Alpine climbers reckon their glory by the 
conquest of virgin peaks of snow and ice. 
Moses made the first ascent of a virgin peak 
of fire and smoke. The landscape that he saw 
from that summit was ringed by the horizon 
of immutable law. 

Moses talked with God face to face. But 
there was a frown upon the divine counte- 
nance, and the voice which spoke to him was 
as stern as fate. The people heard it only as 
the voice of a trumpet, mysterious and inar- 
ticulate, whereat they did exceedingly fear 
and quake, and entreated that it should not 
be spoken unto them any more. But Moses 
heard the words, and knew that they were 
inevitable and eternal. 

Ten commandments he brought down from "Thoushalt 
the mount, written out clearly so that all men 
should understand them, and on stone so that 
they should endure to all generations. One 
of the commandments was positive. Nine of 
them were negative. Moses was the divine 
prohibitionist. Nine-tenths of his emphasis 
lies on the ''Thou shalt not." 

But the point that pierces us, in this revela- 



not." 



58 



The Bible without Christ 



''But I 

loill." 



The history 
of Israel. 



The bright 
spot hidden. 



tion through Moses, is that every " Thou shalt 
not " is a disclosure of what men have done, 
and are prone to do, and would like to do again 
if they dared. The commandments sound like 
a shouting from the mountain-top of the secrets 
of many hearts. After each divine word which 
says, " Thou shalt not," follows a human mur- 
mur which says, "But I will." 

A Bible was once published in which, by a 
typographical error, the not was omitted from 
the seventh commandment. It was called " the 
wicked Bible." The history of Israel, start- 
ing from Sinai, reads like a commentary on a 
wicked Bible with the printer's error multiplied 
by ten. Carry the commandments through the 
books of the Judges and the Kings, and you 
must acknowledge that they compel the con- 
clusion that man is what he ought not to be, 
and ought not to be what he is. 

The one bright spot in the law given by 
Moses is the commandment to make a mercy- 
seat in the Tabernacle, where the sins of the 
people may be confessed before Almighty God,i 
and where the blood of sacrifice, sprinkled upon 
the Ark, may symbolize an atonement between 
man and God. The one good hope which 
cheered Moses in his ministry to a disobedient 

1 Ex. XXV. ; Lev. xvi. 



The Bible without Christ 59 

and gainsaying folk, was the promise that God 
would raise up a prophet from among his breth- 
ren unto whom the people should hearken. ^ 
Blot out that prediction of Christ, and Moses 
stands as an embodiment of failure, — a leader 
who emancipated the nation and condemned the 
race, — the messenger of a divine law which 
was broken even while he was carrying it down 
from the burning mount. 

Turn from history and law to poetry and The music 
experience. In the Psalms the thunders of ^^-P^^^^^- 
Sinai are set to music and translated into 
song. 

But what is that song? It is the song of 
the unattainable. It is the lyric utterance of 
desire and disappointment, shame and peni- 
tence. Those broken-hearted Psalms ! How 
they ring the changes on human frailty and 
suffering and remorse ! How sad and search- 
ing the light with which they are illuminated 
in the story of David's life I 

He could sing divinely, but he could not 
live as he sang. 

Sin is the shadow on genius. 

Literature full of beauty and harmony : life The discord 
full of ugliness and discord. A book written ^-^ ^^■^^' 

1 Deut. xviii. 15. 



60 The Bible without Christ 

with simplicity and purity and noble senti- 
ment: a writer touched with vanity and self- 
ishness, impurity and vengeful passion. How 
often has that strange contrast been discovered ! 
David knew his own infirmity and guilt. 
He knew the corruption and disgrace of his 
house. He laid hold on the promise of divine 
mercy in the Christ. He looked and longed 
for the coming of that King who should reign 
in righteousness forever. He did not under- 
stand the full meaning of that hope. He held 
fast to it as a drowning man clings to a rope in 
the night. He does not see it. He feels it. 
The gleam Take away that rescuing hope of divine help 
of mercy -j^^.^ upon one who is mighty to save,^ and what 
is left in the Psalms? A passion of longing 
for inaccessible holiness. 

" The desire of the moth for the star, 
Of the night for the morrow; 
The devotion to something afar 
From the sphere of our sorrow." 

The poetry of the Bible without Christ is a 
musical confession of the impossibility of get- 
ting out of God's sight, and of the hopelessness 
of being pure enough in heart to have sight 
of God. 

1 Psalm Ixxxix. 19. 



The Bible without Christ 61 

Does the philosophy of the Bible bring us Solomon' 
any different message, apart from Christ ? ^^^ ^^' 

Solomon stands in the Old Testament as the 
representative of wisdom. In the books that 
bear his name the divine commandments are 
cut and polished into the jewels of an ethical 
system. They become brilliant, symmetrical, 
memorable ; compact treasures of morality, fit 
to keep — in a storehouse. 

A hundred epigrams flash from the divine 
law, in the hands of Solomon, like rays of 
light. Its wisdom, reasonableness, and beauty 
are exhibited from every side. We see how 
prudent, how profitable, how admirable it is to 
be perfectly good, — and how impossible ! 

The king who made these diamond proverbs Solomon', 
was the man who showed us how easily they *^^ ^^' 
may be burned to coal in the flame of passion. 

The eleventh chapter of the First Book of 
Kings is the record of an experiment in the 
reduction of philosophy to ashes. The lover 
of wisdom chooses folly for his bed-fellow. 
The sage whose shining words rise like an airy 
ladder toward the skies, finds, like other men, 
that the downward path is the easiest. The 
wisest of mankind, in theory, becomes the 
meanest, in practice, — an idolater despising 
idols, a sensualist praising virtue, a tyrant 



62 The Bible without Christ 

extolling justice, an unchained prisoner of his 
own despair. 
Solomon's The book of Ecclesiastes, whoever wrote it, 
epitaph. contains the epitaph of Solomon. " Vanity of 
vanities, all is vanity." It is the hand-book 
of pessimists ; the tragic monodrama of man's 
self -betrayal ; the epic of the suicide of hope. 
Close the book, and write upon it this sentence, 
"The world by wisdom knew not God." ^ 

The mount Beyond philosophy rises prophecy, — the 
of prophecy, jjjq^j^^ Qf yision, whose top touches the stars 
and whose horizon spreads beyond the encir- 
cling ocean-stream of time. 

The human name that is graven highest on 
this mountain is the name of Isaiah. Whether 
that name represents the prophetic elevation of 
only one among the sons of men, or of more 
than one, matters little to us in our present 
study. The Isaiah-spirit is the same, whether 
the mount was climbed but once, or more than 
once. The loftiest point reached in the Old 
Testament is that at which we see, in lonely 
grandeur, a human figure called Isaiah. 

There he stands, above the confusions and 
perturbations, the wrecked hopes, and the on- 
rushing calamities, the shames and fears, the 
1 1 Cor. i. 21. 



The Bible without Christ 63 

desolations and disasters of his people. He 
looks around him, with unsealed eyes, and what 
is it that he beholds ? 

He sees " one that cometh from Edom, with Isaiah's 
dyed garments from Bozrah, glorious in his ^^^' 
apparel, travelling in the greatness of his 
strength, speaking in righteousness, mighty 
to save." ^ But this vision, if there is no Christ 
in the Old Testament, is a delusion, a mirage, 
a Brocken-spectre. It vanishes. And what is 
left? 

An unbroken shadow of disgrace, despair, The residue 
and gloom, resting like night upon the world. ^-^ «^««p«*^- 
"Ah sinful nation, a people laden with in- 
iquity, a seed of evil doers, children that are cor- 
rupters: they have forsaken the Lord, they have 
provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, 
they are gone away backward." ^ Burden after 
burden, in the prophet's song, — the burden 
of Babylon, the burden of Moab, the burden 
of Damascus, the burden of Egypt. Doom 
after doom, around the prophet's horizon, — the 
doom of Israel, the doom of Judah. "The 
whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. 
From the sole of the foot even unto the head 
there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and 
bruises, and putrifying sores." ^ 

1 Is. Ixiii. 1. 2 Is. i. 4. 8 Is. i. 5, q. 



64 



The Bible without Christ 



The world's 
want. 



The dream 
departs. 



Never man lived on earth who felt so deeply 
the world's want of a Saviour from sin as Isaiah 
felt it. Never man saw so clearly that hu- 
manity is helpless and hopeless under the power 
of evil unless God comes to the rescue. The 
law's maker must be its keeper. He who 
cursed sin must come and take it away. A 
redeeming God, holy and therefore obedient, 
loving and therefore suffering, faithful and 
therefore triumphant, — this is the Immanuel 
who is needed in a world of sin. Isaiah's soul 
was driven by that need upward and upward 
on the mount of vision, higher and higher in 
the divine solitude of inspiration. From that 
lofty height his voice floated down in songs of 
glorious cheer to his fellow-men. "Comfort 
ye, comfort ye, my people." ^ " Rejoice ye with 
Jerusalem, and be glad with her, all ye that 
love her : rejoice for joy with her, all ye that 
mourn for her." 2 

But what was it that he saw to kindle that 
singing hope in his soul? Nothing. He 
dreamed, but there was really nothing for 
him to see. 

There was no roseate dawn on the far edge 
of night, no auroral radiance of a virgin-born 
Prince of Peace, no prophetic gleam of the 

1 Is. xl. 1. 2 Is. Ixvi. 10. 



The Bible tvithout Christ 65 

glory of a Kinsman Redeemer who should bear 
our griefs and carry our sorrows, who should 
be wounded for our transgressions, and by 
whose stripes we should be healed. When 
Isaiah thought that he saw the upward-break- 
ing rays of such a brightness, it was but an 
illusion of sleep. There was no Christ. There 
was to be no Christ. God never intended it. 
Man only imagined it. The high and holy 
One who inhabiteth eternity looked upon the 
inhabitants of earth, "and he saw that there 
was no man, and wondered that there was 
no intercessor." ^ But His arm did not bring 
salvation unto Him, neither did His righteous- 
ness sustain Him. The Redeemer never meant 
to come to Zion. He was too great, too infinite 
to enter into human life, and be numbered with 
the transgressors, and bear the sin of many, 
and make intercession for the transgressors. 
The very thought of such an advent was folly 
and presumption. 

Isaiah awakes from his dream. Every trace The prophet 
of the Christ disappears from his vision, blotted ^^^^^"^^• 
out in the encircling night. What is his mes- 
sage now ? What song is left on his lips ? 

A cry of woe and desolation. " They shall 
look unto the earth; and behold trouble and 
1 Is. lix. 16. 



6Q The Bible without Christ 

darkness, dimness of anguish ; and they shall 

be driven to darkness." ^ " Your iniquities have 

separated between you and your God, and your 

sins have hid his face from you, that he will 
not hear. "2 

The night There is no explanation of the mystery of 

evil. There is no light upon the future. There 
is only a shadow resting over all the earth, a 
shadow hiding the very face of God, — an un- 
broken shadow falling from the Old Testament 
without Christ. 

1 Is. viii. 22. 2 Is. Ux. 2. 



descends. 



The Bible without Christ 67 

II 

The Intolerable Light 

It may seem as if it were impossible to take A hook filled 
Christ out of the New Testament without de- "^'^^ '^''''^* 
stroying it altogether. So entirely does the 
personality of Jesus pervade the book, that if 
He were withdrawn it would fall to pieces, like 
a tower from which the mortar had been all 
removed. 

But it is not of Jesus as an example of noble Jesus 
manhood, a teacher of moral truth, a worker of 
social reform, that I speak. It is of Jesus as 
the Christ, the divinely anointed redeemer of 
men, the bringer of salvation from sin. These 
two aspects of Jesus were, indeed, vitally united 
in fact. Yet it is possible to separate them in 
thought. It is conceivable that the New Tes- 
tament might have reported Jesus to us as a 
prophet without making any revelation of Him 
as the Saviour. 

Such a conception has already been enter- 
tained among men. It has been presented by 
some teachers, whose literary and historical 
sense is very imperfect, as an interpretation of 
what the New Testament actually is. It has 
been put forward by others, whose scholarship 



divided 
from Christ. 



68 The Bible without Christ 

is better, as a theory of what the New Testa- 
ment ought to be, and probably would have 
been, if it had been written in an age free from 
superstition. 
A new kind That which is really valuable in the book, we 
Testament. ^^^ ^^^^' ^^ ^^^ picture of a beautiful character, 
its rules for good conduct, its spirit of piety 
and virtue, the clear light which it throws upon 
God and human life and immortality. If it 
contained only the Sermon on the Mount, it 
would still be complete and sufficient. The 
substance of it all could be put into an ethical 
creed. The essential Jesus is only the teacher 
and illustrator of a perfect morality. He is the 
central figure of Christianity not because He 
did more than man can do, but simply because 
He did what every man ought to do. All that 
goes beyond this in the New Testament, — all 
that refers to Him as the sacrifice for sin, the 
mediator between God and man, the only begot- 
ten Son who came forth from the bosom of the 
Father, was born and lived, was crucified and 
died, was buried and rose again, in order to 
redeem and reconcile the world to God, — is 
partly imaginary, and partly superstitious, and 
wholly unnecessary. A New Testament with- 
out Christ in this sense, would be not only pos- 
sible, but very desirable. 



The Bible without Christ 69 

The experiment may be tried. The testimony What is it 
of Jesus and the Apostles in regard to His work ^^^^^^ 
as the Saviour may be obliterated, as the Russian 
censor "blacks out" the passages of a book 
which he deems dangerous. The cross as the 
central scene of the great reconciliation between 
man and God may be hidden. Christ as the 
deliverer from sin and death may be annulled 
in our thought. We shall then be able to esti- 
mate the meaning and value of the New Testa- 
ment without Him. 

There are two things in the book which must Two points 
strike every fair-minded reader. In two points *"^^*^^^^^- 
it is distinguished among all the books of the 
world. It gives a new and intensely searching 
view of the problem of moral evil. It is written 
from beginning to end in sight of death as the 
door which leads into eternity. 

On these two points the New Testament 
pours an unrivalled light. Does it give us any 
comfort or hope in regard to them, without 
Christ? 

It was Jesus of Nazareth who illuminated what Jesus 
the moral evil in the world most deeply and ««y«<>/«*"^- 
clearly. He showed its spring, its secret 
workings, and the power which lies behind it. 
Calmly, steadily, with a sublime indifference to 



70 



The Bible without Christ 



The sanity 
of His 
doctrine. 



The pene- 
tration of 
His doctrine. 



theory, with an inexorable sense of the facts of 
human life, He pressed His serene and faithful 
analysis of sin home to its centre in the inner 
life of man. 

A falsehood on the lips means a lie in the 
heart. Violence in conduct means a cruel 
streak in character. Uncleanness in the life 
means impurity in the soul. "Those things 
which proceed out of the mouth come forth from 
the heart ; and they defile the man." ^ 

Jesus does not say that everything in human 
nature is evil. He does not say that all men 
are entirely depraved. He recognizes the good 
things that a good man bringeth forth out of his 
good treasure. 2 But he says also that all men, 
even the best, have need to be converted and 
become as little children ; ^ all men owe a vast 
debt which they are unable to pay ; * all men 
are unprofitable servants ; ^ all men have some- 
thing to repent of, in the presence of God.^ 

And this something which demands repent- 
ance is not outward and accidental ; it is in- 
ward and personal. It is the angry passion ; 
it is the impure imagination ; it is the secret 
unbelief which blinds the soul. All the excuses 
with which men cover and hide their sin grow 



1 Matt. XV. 18. 

2 Matt. xii. 35. 



3 Matt, xviii. 3. 

4 Matt, xviii. 23. 



5 Lu^ xvii. 10. 

6 Luke xiii. 3. 



The Bible without Christ 71 

thin and transparent in the light of this search- 
ing analysis. Jesus reveals the underlying 
facts. The sins of men are not the result of 
circumstances, the fruit of outward tempta- 
tions, things which belong to the world and 
the age in which we live. They are things 
which belong to us and come from us. The 
fashions and forms of sin change with the cen- 
turies and differ in different lands. But the 
essence of it is always the same. It comes 
from within. The man in whose heart the root 
is hidden is responsible for the fruit. This is 
what Jesus says about the source of sin. 

No less clear and penetrating is His teaching The secrets 
in regard to its secret workings and its fatal ^g^^/ 
results. He reveals the truth that goodness 
does not consist in obedience to the letter of 
the law, but in harmony with its spirit. A 
man may keep all the commandments, as the 
young ruler did, and yet because he is selfish 
he is outside of the kingdom of God.i A man 
may observe all the Mosaic precepts and per- 
form all the ritual of religion, as the Pharisee 
did, and yet be a greater sinner than the Pub- 
lican who stands afar off and beats upon his 

breast.2 Men are strangers to their own sins; 
»■ < 
1 Matt. xix. 2 Luke xviii. 



72 The Bible without Christ 

they do not recognize them when they meet 
them in the street. They are blind leaders of 
the blind, whose feet stumble in the gulf. The 
angry impulse is the "blot in the 'scutcheon." 
The real stain of blood is on the inside of the 
heart. The idle, irreverent word is blasphemy. 
There are no human lips that have not taken 
God's name in vain. The scorn of brethren is the 
little spark that kindles unquenchable iflames. 
They in whose breast this spark smoulders are 
"in danger of hell-fire."^ But they do not 
know it. They carry their lighted candles 
through the powder-magazine with their eyes 
shut. 
The Sermon The Sermon on the Mount contains the most 
^^ ^. thorough diagnosis of sin that has ever been 

made. It proceeds by contrast with the symp- 
toms of spiritual health and soundness. The 
Beatitudes are not only blessings to be desired; 
they are also tests to be applied to the heart. 
It was not without significance that this dis- 
course was delivered from a lofty place. Its 
ideal of holiness rises as far above our actual 
life as an Alpine peak of stainless snow above 
the confusion and squalor and misery of the 
frail villages that hide in the valleys. " Be ye 
perfect even as your Father which is in heaven 
1 Matt. V. 22. 



The Bible without Christ T3 

is perfect."^ That summit is inaccessible if 
there is no divine Christ to lead and lift us 
thither. 

But there is another element in the doctrine The power 
of Jesus in regard to sin which we must not ^^^*^^^*"' 
forget. He discloses a secret power behind it, 
which clothes it with strange terror and might. 
He teaches that there is a force, an influence, 
a spirit in the world, which is altogether evil, 
and which is continually desiring, seeking, and 
working sin. It is the unclean spirit rejoicing 
in the defilement of the house which it inhabits .^ 
It is the father of lies ready to beget falsehood 
in every listening mind.^ It is the enemy of 
souls sowing tares in the field by night.* It is 
Satan longing to get possession of the soul that 
he may sift it as wheat. ^ 

Whether we take this teaching of Jesus lit- The wam- 
erally or not, whether we believe that evil is *^^^-^ ^^^^' 
embodied in demonic personality or not, one 
thing is unquestionable. Jesus regarded evil 
as a positive, organic, ever active, malignant 
power, a Prince of this world, whose domain lies 
all around us, whose influence touches us on 
every side, the friend of sin and the foe of the 

1 Matt. V. 48. 3 John viii. 44. « Luke xxii. 31. 

2 Matt. xii. 43 f£. * Matt. xiii. 39. 



Satan. 



74 The Bible without Christ 

soul. There is a conflict going on in the world. 
It is not a mere game. It is an elemental war- 
fare between right and wrong. We are cast 
into the midst of this conflict. An unseen, 
mighty, skilful, relentless adversary is against 
us. And in every heart there, is a traitor ready 
to betray the citadel into his hands. 
The fear of The additional fear which this mysterious 
teaching of Jesus lends to the sense of sin made 
itself felt in human experience for many centu- 
ries. Doubtless it was over-emphasized and 
exaggerated, by a false interpretation of His 
words, into an immense and shapeless terror. 
A grotesque and impossible devil tyrannized 
over ages of superstition. Men believed in a 
Satan who was practically the rival of God, 
equal in power if not in glory, and as immortal 
in evil as God is in good. There is no trace 
of such a doctrine in the words of Jesus. ^ It 
was natural, it was inevitable, that men should 
react from the exaggeration, and cast off almost 
entirely, as they have done to-day, the thought 
of an actual power of evil, outside of the human 
soul and inexorably hostile to it. 

But when we return to the teachings of 
Jesus, and study them with candour and calm- 
ness, we see that thought in His mind clearly 
1 The Gospel for an Age of Doubt, p. 272. 



The Bible without Christ 75 

and unmistakably. He teaches us that our 
conflict is not merely with ourselves. There 
is an enemy against us who is mightier than 
man. We need a defender, a deliverer, a 
divine friend to fight with us and for us. 

Where, then, shall we look for such a power- Who wui 
ful friend? If Jesus was not the Christ who fi^^^f^^""'^ 
came to save us from our sins, then there 
is no captain of salvation, no conqueror of 
Satan, no liberator of captive souls. We must 
fight the battle alone against unknown and 
heavy odds. The triumph of Jesus over evil 
was for Himself only. It gives no assurance 
that we also shall overcome the world. On 
the contrary, it makes our victory seem the 
more doubtful, when we remember His perfect 
courage and inflexible strength, in contrast 
with our waverings and the many defeats that 
we have already suffered. We have begun to 
lose the battle already. Who shall turn the 
tide for our discouraged forces ? 

The sinlessness of Jesus comforts us little Jesusour 
unless it has some remedial bearing upon our ^^<J^^J^' 

° ^ only if He is 

sins. If it is but an example of what every our Saviour. 
man ought to be, its very perfection daunts and 
disheartens us. Something less absolute and 
flawless would be better suited to our need. 
In fact, men have never dared or cared to 



76 The Bible without Christ 

make the stainless Jesus the real pattern of 
their lives, until they have learned to believe 
in Him as the redeeming sacrifice for their sins. 
They have chosen other ideals, other heroes, 
other examples, — less exacting, less disheart- 
ening, less depressing by contrast with them- 
selves. 
Has He no It is the ransoming faith that " Christ suffered 
forqive? ^^^ ^^'" ^^^^ gives His disciples courage to say 
that He also left us " an example that we should 
follow in his steps." ^ The idea of "The Imi- 
tation of Christ " is hopeful and inspiring only 
to the heart that has first felt the liberating 
touch of His pierced hand. Sinners do not 
venture to go after the sinless Jesas unless they 
hear Him say " The Son of man hath power on 
earth to forgive sins."^ 

But in a Christless gospel this word has no 
place, no meaning. There was no such unique 
power committed to the hands of Jesiis. All 
the consoling, reassuring, inspiriting utterances 
of Jesus, which are connected with His sublime 
confidence in His divine mission and authority 
to seek and save the lost, — utterances which 
strangelj^ enough are closely and inseparably 
connected with the prevision of His death, His 
laying down His life for the sheep,^ His lifting 
1 : Peter ii. 21. 2 Matt. ix. 6. s John x. 11. 



The Bible without Christ 77 

up upon the cross,^ — all these words of saving 
hope must be "blacked out." 

They lose their significance, if the Redeemer 
is lost. There was no ransom wrought upon 
the cross. There was only the payment of 
the debt of nature. The good Shepherd 
laid down His life. But it was not for the 
sheep. It was only to show the cruelty of the 
robbers. There was no victory on Calvary. 
It was a defeat, in which the one sinless being 
on earth was crushed and killed hy the sin of 
the world, — but not /or it. 

Let us turn from the Gospils to the Epistles, The Epistles 
and consider what they have to say to us about ^f^^^^ 
sin, when we have taken out of them the idea 
of a work wrought by Jesus Christ for the 
salvation of the world. It is evident that the 
Apostles have received the teaching of their 
Master in regard to the source, the workings, 
the guilt, and the danger of sin, and that it has 
made a profound impression upon them. 

No doubt there was some difference between st. Paul and 
St. John and St. Paul in regard to the philo- f/-.'^f'''r 

° ^ ^ their teach- 

sophic forms in which they expressed their mg about 
thought upon this subject. St. Paul was trained ^*^* 
in the rabbinical theology of Jerusalem. St. 
1 John iii. 14. 



78 The Bible without Christ 

John was influenced by the Platonic philosophy 
of Alexandria. St. Paul lays emphasis upon the 
connection of sin with " the flesh," with man's 
lower, physical nature. ^ St. John brings out 
"the darkness" of sin as contrasted with the 
light of God.2 St. Paul traces the entrance of 
sin into the world, to Adam's disobedience.^ 
St. John speaks of " the world " as an order of 
existence estranged from God, which must not 
be loved because it is opposed to the love of 
God,* and declares that " the whole world lieth 
in the Evil One."^ But both agree in teaching 
that sin is transgression of the divine law;^ 
and that its fruit is death.^ It is their sense 
of the reality and guilt of the transgression, 
their overwhelming sense of the greatness of 
the disaster which threatens all men on account 
of it, that separates them as writers from the 
easy-going, reckless pagan world. " If we say 
we have not sinned," says St. John, " we deceive 
ourselves and the truth is not in us."^ "When 
I would do good," cries St. Paul, "evil is 

1 Kom. vii. 5 ; viii. 4, 6 ; 2 Cor. x. 2 ; Gal. v. 17 ; Eph. 
ii. 3. 

2 1 John i. 6 ; ii. 9, 11 ; Rev. xvi. 10. 

3 Rom. V. 12-21. 6 1 John v. 19. 

* 1 John ii. 15. ^ i John iii. 4 ; Rom. vii. 13. 

7 Rom. vi. 23 ; viii. 6 ; 1 John iii. 14 ; v. 16 ; 2 Cor. 
XV. 66. 8 1 John i. 8. 



The Bible without Christ 79 

present with me. O wretched man that I am, 
who shall deliver me from the body of this 
death?"! 

But if this is all that they have to say to us, is this all? 
if they bring us no message of a divine Christ 
who hath appeared to put away sin, how lame 
and impotent is their conclusion ! Read St. 
Paul's answer to his own question, who is to 
deliver him, with Christ left out : . ' I thank 
God, through nobody.'' Read St. John's con- 
solation to those who have sinned, without the 
gospel of atonement. 'If any man sin, we 
have no advocate with the Father, neither is 
there any propitiation for our sins, nor for the 
sins of the whole world.' 'Herein is love, not 
that we loved God, but that he did not love us, 
neither did send his Son to be the justification 
for our sins.' 

Go on a little further with this Christless A negative 
New Testament. Listen to St. Paul again : ^^^^^^-^ 
' For as through one man sin entered into the 
world, and death through sin, and so death 
passed unto all men, for that all sinned, — even 
so there was no grace of God, and the gift of 
grace by the one man, Jesus Christ, did not 
abound unto many.' 'Sin reigned unto death, 
but grace did not reign through righteousness 
1 Rom. Tii. 21, 24. 



80 The Bible without Christ 

unto eternal life through Jesus Christ our 
Lord.' ' God commendeth his love towards us 
in that while we were yet sinners nobody died 
for us.' 'Wherefore remember that ye were 
aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and 
strangers to the covenants of promise ; and 
now ye that were far off are not made nigh by 
the blood of Christ.' 'God is not in Christ 
reconciling the world unto himself. ' ' There is 
no mediator between God and man.' 'The 
life that I now live in the flesh I live by faith 
in myself, for the Son of God did not love me, 
nor give himself for me.' 

Listen to the author of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews : ' Having then no high priest who 
hath passed into the heavens, let us not draw 
near with boldness unto the throne of grace, 
for we have no promise of mercy, nor grace to 
help in time of need.' 'For we are not come 
unto Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, 
and to the blood of sprinkling which speaketh 
better things than that of Abel, but unto Mt. 
Sinai that burns with fire.' 

Listen to St. Peter : ' We know that we 
were not redeemed, neither with corruptible 
things as silver and gold, nor with the precious 
blood of Christ as of a lamb without blemish 
and without spot.' 'Wherefore, not having 



The Bible without Christ 81 

seen him, we love liim not, neither do we re- 
joice in him, since we receive not the end of 
our faith, nor the salvation of our souls.' 

This is what the New Testament would say- 
to a world of sin, without Christ. It is surely 
not consoling. 

But the significance of this teaching is very Death and 
much intensified and deepened by the view 
which the New Testament gives of death as the 
gateway of another life. 

The heathen world in the first century was 
for the most part inclined to cover up the fact 
of death as much as possible, to hide it in 
flowers, to put it out of sight. But the Chris- 
tians, perhaps because they were persecuted and 
afflicted and continually in danger of death, 
perhaps because they had a truer and a braver 
philosophy of life, followed another course. 
They faced death steadily, looked it in the ^^ 

eyes, prepared to meet it, and conquered all its 
terrors by their faith in Christ as the Saviour. 

There is no other book in the world which 
can compare with the New Testament in its 
serene, unflinching recognition of death's in- 
evitableness. There is no other book in the 
world which has so clear and courageous an 
insight into its eternal issues. From beginning 



of death. 



82 The Bible without Christ 

to end it is pervaded with the conviction that 
" It is appointed unto all men once to die, and 
after death the judgment." 

The burden Now the burden of death is twofold. There 
is a burden of present sorrow and anguish, in 
the sufferings of the flesh which precede and 
accompany it, and in the pains of the spirit 
which are associated with the breaking of hu- 
man ties and the bereavement of love. There 
is also a burden of fear and anxiety for the 
future, a sense of apprehension in regard to the 
perils and mysteries of the unknown world. 

The faith Both of these burdens, in the New Testament, 

are lifted and bravely borne by trust in Christ. 
It is the sense of fellowship with Him in their 
sufferings that sustains the Christians in the 
valley of the shadow of death. It is the confi- 
dence that He has risen from the dead and that 
He will plead for them at the judgment, that 
enables them to face the future with composure. 
But if Christ is taken away, both burdens fall 
back with new and crushing weight upon the 
heart. "If Christ be not risen, then is our 
preaching vain, and your faith is also vain." 
"If in this life only we have hope in Christ, 
we are of all men most miserable." ^ 

What practical assurance, what tangible 
1 Cor. XV. 14, 19. 



that lightens 
it. 



The Bible without Christ 83 

proof, is there of a divine sympathy in our How do we 
sufferings, without the vision of the Son of God ^^^^f ^-^ 

o ' God's sym- 

who has borne our griefs and carried our sor- pathy? 
rows ? The God of nature, the God who made 
the heavens bright and beautiful with stars, and 
ordained the immutable glories of the revolving 
year, — what can He understand of the pains 
that rack our human hearts, what part has He 
in the broken and tragical drama of mortal life ? 
A sublime spectator, 

" He sees with equal eyes, as God of aU, 
A hero perish or a sparrow fall." 

I think a man or woman with a breaking Nature's 
heart, pierced with the spear of pain, smitten *^ w^^^^c^' 
with the anguish of inexorable separation, 
might go out into this splendid world in 
the spring, when the glory of earth's face is 
renewed with joy and the time for the singing 
of birds is come, — such a lonely, desolate, per- 
ishing man or woman might walk among the 
unconscious flowers, and look up to the silent- 
shining sky, and the unfriended heart would 
break again with the thought that there is after 
all no clear word of divine sympathy with it, — 
no human life of God, no Christ who wept at 
the grave of Lazarus, and agonized in the gar- 
den, and died on the cross, in order that He 



84 The Bible without Christ 

might know, with us, the mortal sorrows of a 
world of sin and death. 
The risen What comfort, what peace, is there in the 

Christ. New Testament view of death, unless we can 

see beyond it what St. Paul saw when he said, 
" I know whom I have believed, and am per- 
suaded that he is able to keep that which I 
have committed unto him against that day.''^ 
— " O death, where is thy sting ? O grave, 
where is thy victory? The sting of death is 
sin ; and the strength of sin is the law. But 
thanks be to God, which giveth us the vic- 
tory through our Lord Jesus Christ." ^ Annul 
that gospel of victory over death by One who 
has taken away the sting of sin, and what 
remains? A certain fearful looking-for of 
judgment; a long vision of futurity with no 
reasonable hope of escape from evil and its 
consequences; a prospect of dying without 
getting rid of the disease which kills us. 
Now He is Read again the words of the Apostles after 
you have blotted out their gospel of the con- 
quest of death by Christ. 'Through death 
he was destroyed by him that had the power 
of death, that is, the devil, and brought no 
deliverance to them who through fear of death 
were all their lifetime subject to bondage.' 
12 Tim. i. 12. 2 i cor. xv. 55-57. 



dead.' 



The Bible without Christ 85 

' God hath not raised him up, neither were the 
pains of death loosed, because it was not pos- 
sible that he should escape from it.' 'The 
enemy that shall never be destroyed is death.' 
'This same Jesus shall never come again.' 
'He liveth not to make intercession for his 
people.' 'Even as he never was offered to 
bear the sin of many, so shall he never again 
appear without sin unto salvation to them that 
wait for him.' 'If we believe not that Jesus 
died and rose again, even so them also which 
sleep with Jesus will God never bring with 
him.' 

" Christ is not risen ! 
Eat, drink, and die, for we are souls bereaved ; 

Of all the creatures under heaven's high cope, 

We are most hopeless, who once had most hope, 
And most beliefless, that had most believed. 

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, 

As of the unjust, also of the just; 

Yea, of that Just One too. 

It is the one sad Gospel that is true, — 

Christ is not risen ! " i 

To take Christ out of the Bible is to make it The Book 
worse than useless to a sinful world. It is to ^^^^ ^^^*' 
make it crushing, disheartening, terrifying, — 
the saddest book that was ever written. The 
Old Testament casts upon us an unbroken 

1 A. H. Clough, Ilaster Day, 1849. 



86 The Bible without Christ 

shadow of gloomy fate. The New Testament 
pierces it with an intolerable light of conscious 
guilt and coming judgment. 
The restora^ But restore Christ to His place in the Bible, 
^oT't '^^^ ^^ becomes the book of hope and joy. The 

unbroken shadow is changed into the adum- 
bration of the coming Redeemer ; the shadow 
Christ^ whose angel moves before the strug- 
gling host of all who will follow God's guidance 
through the wilderness of sin. The intolerable 
light is transformed into a blessed healing 
radiance : the light of the knowledge of the 
glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, the 
Saviour of the world. 



1 The Shadow Christ, an introduction to Christ Himself. 
By Gerald Stanley Lee. The Century Company. 



IV 



CHRIST'S MISSION TO THE INNER 
LIFE 



What, then, is the service rendered to the world by 
Christianity ? The proclamation of " good news." And 
what is this good news? The pardon of sin. The God 
of holiness loving the world and reconciling it to Him- 
self by Jesus, in order to establish the Kingdom of God, 
the city of souls, the life of heaven upon earth, — here 
you have the whole of it ; but in this is a revolution. 

— Amiel's Journal, Jan. 27, 1869. 



IV 



CHRIST'S MISSION TO THE INNER 
LIFE 

The ultimate mission of Christ was to the >l pro- 
inner life of man. gramm^in 

outline. 
His ministry there was not in words alone, 

but in character and action ; in what He was 
and what He did for men ; the heart of His 
message was Himself, His life, His death. 

The central gospel of this message is the 
reality and completeness of peace with God 
through the forgiveness of sins. 

The forgiveness of sins brings with it the 
freedom and power of a new inner life of divine 
righteousness. 

These four statements may serve to mark 
out, in a broad way, the line of thought that I 
wish to follow in this chapter. 



90 



Chrisfs Mission to the Inner Life 



The Kingdom is within You 



The seat of 
empire. 



The springs 
of life. 



Christ came into the world to proclaim and 
establish the kingdom of God among men. 
The sway of that kingdom extends over every 
region of our life. But its seat must be within 
us. 

It must reach and reconcile and rule that 
interior region of the heart which lies behind 
audible utterance and visible action, below 
social ties and bonds of human fellowship, 
underneath conscious reasonings and formu- 
lated theories, — that undiscovered country 
where the moral sentiments, the religious feel- 
ing, the sense of dependence, and the joy or 
grief of living, have their home. 

It is there that the real forces of human life 
are generated. Man is the one creature in the 
universe in whom the mechanical counts least, 
and the spiritual counts most. Not only his 
personal happiness, but also his actual power 
and efficiency in the world depend upon the 
condition of his inner life. He could not " live 
by bread alone," even if he would. Every 
phase of his existence betrays the presence of 
an energy, whether for good or for evil, which 



Chrisfs Mission to the Inner Life 91 

is drawn from some secret source deep within 
him, and fed by streams which flow far below 
the surface of his physical nature. 

Vitality, in man, is a spiritual force condi- 
tioned, but not created, by a material embodi- 
ment. A vitometer will never be invented, 
because there is no instrument delicate enough 
to take the temperature of the inner life. Even 
in dealing with bodily disease, the wise physi- 
cian, while he may make his diagnosis absolute, 
always recognizes an element of uncertainty in 
his prognosis. "While there is life there is 
hope," he says. He might add, " While there 
is hope there is life." Hope has healed more 
diseases than any medicine. 

The life of man is a demonstrated daily mira- 
cle. It shows that the physical laws which we 
know and the physical forces which we can 
measure, are traversed by spiritual laws which 
we do not know and spiritual forces which we 
cannot measure. It proves the reality and 
potency of that which is invisible and impon- 
derable. 

The various kinds of energy which are de- Spiritual 
veloped from heat are not more real, nor more •^<^^^^^- 
powerful, than the actual working force which 
is developed in the world from love in the 
inner life of man. Gravitation itself does no 



92 Christ's Mission to the Inner Life 

more to insure the stability of the material 
order, than inward peace of soul does to main- 
tain the stability of the social order. The 
wind that bloweth where it listeth, is no 
more efficient in purifying and vitalizing the 
atmosphere, than are the secret spiritual cur- 
rents of penitence and faith and aspiration 
which breathe through the hearts of men, in 
cleansing and renewing the inner air which 
keeps the soul alive. 
Sin deadens This is the reason why sin is a power of 
^ ' disorder and death. It is not because it affects 

the outer life, not because it sows the seeds of 
physical corruption and decay, not because it 
brings forth crimes of violence and destruction. 
It is because it pervades the inner life, because 
it poisons the streams of human existence at 
the fountain-head, because it paralyzes the 
vital energies of humanity. 

Sin is a separating, secluding, imprisoning 
power which shuts the soul off from the purify- 
ing breath of the divine Spirit and leaves it in 
a dungeon, to breathe the same air over and 
over again until it is smothered. Sin is a 
rebellious, turbulent, tormenting power which 
destroys the inward peace of the soul, agitates 
it with restless passion, tortures it with haunt- 
ing fear. Sin is a selfish, envious, hateful 



Ohrisfs Mission to the Inner Life 93 

power which takes the very life out of love 
and makes it impotent for good, a vain dream 
never to be realized, a beautiful, ineffectual 
ghost. 

The supreme directness, the triumphant sim- Jesus knew 
plicity of Jesus as the restorer of humanity to ^^^ ^^f ^^ 

r 'J J disorder. 

its true order and the bringer of a new king- 
dom into the world, came from the clearness 
with which He saw that the world's chief 
trouble and man's deepest need lie in the inner 
life. He wasted no strength in polishing the 
outside of the cups and platters on which 
man's exterior wants are served. He spent 
no time in whitening sepulchres. He knew 
that the seat of real goodness and permanent 
happiness and divine harmony must be in the 
inner life. The incomparable service to man- 
kind which was to give Him the eternal chief- 
taincy in the spiritual life, was a service to the 
soul. 

There can be no real empire of peace unless He sought 
this deepest region is reached. There must be ^ ^ ^^'^^^^' 
no nook or corner or crevice of man's life left 
unexplored, unsubdued, unreconciled ; no lurk- 
ing-place of rebellion ; no fountain of discord ; 
no 

" little rift within the lute, 
That slowly widening makes the music mute." 



94 Ohrisfs Mission to the Inner Life 

The kingdom must go in to the centre and 
down to the bottom of personality, and work 
from within outward, — from below upward. 
This was the programme of Christ ; and to 
carry it out He directed His journey to the 
inner life of man. 
Biessingshij On the way thither, like a prince in progress, 
the way. jj^ conferred inestimable gifts and blessings 
in the outer circles of human existence. The 
doctrine of Jesus has widened the thoughts of 
men. The example of Jesus has crystallized 
the moral aspirations of men into a flawless 
and imperishable ideal. The precept of Jesus 
has struck the keynote for a new harmony of 
human fellowship. The influence of Jesus has 
given inspiration and guidance to philosophy 
and literature and the fine arts. 
The inward But as we follow Him through these regions 
quest. ^Q ^^Q made aware that He is pressing inward 

to a goal beyond. He seeks the thinker, we 
say, behind the thought ; the person, behind 
the social order. He aims to elevate man by 
uplifting men. His mission is not to masses, 
nor to classes ; it is to the individual. But 
when He finds the individual, as a thinker, as a 
social unit, what then ? Still Christ seems to 
press inward, to seek a yet deeper point. 

His mission to society is through the indi- 



Chrisfs Mission to the Inner Life 95 

vidual. But when we have said that, we have 
not yet said all. His mission to the individual 
is through the inner life. He has not arrived 
at the goal of His journey, He has not spoken 
the last word of His message until He has said 
to the paralytic, " Son, be of good cheer, thy 
sins are forgiven thee " ; and to the woman of 
Syro-Phoenicia, " Go in peace " ; and to the 
disciples, " Let not your heart be troubled " ; 
and to all the weary and heavy-laden, " Come 
unto me, and ye shall find rest unto your 
souls." 

The kingdom of God which Jesus proclaims A kingdom 
and establishes is a kingdom of the soul. Its ^/^^e*^^^- 
deepest meaning is a personal experience. Its 
essence is righteousness and peace and joy in 
the Holy Ghost. Its dwelling-place and seat 
of power is in the inner life. 



96 Ohrisi's Mission to the Inner Life 

n 

The Picture of Jesus in the Soul 

The imprint If this be true, it is perfectly natural, and 
of Christ. altogether reasonable, that the earliest and clear- 
est and most enduring manifestation of Christ 
should be in this region of man's inmost being. 
The impress of His character should be deepest 
upon the sub-liminal self. The traces of His 
presence in the world should be most distinct 
and most indelible in the records of spiritual 
experience. The evidences of His healing, puri- 
fying, harmonizing, saving power should be 
found first and most abundantly in those under- 
lying relations, those mysterious sentiments and 

propensities, — 

" those obstinate questionings 
Of sense and outward things, 
Fallings from us, vanishings ; 
Blank misgivings of a creature 
Moving about in worlds not realized, 
High instincts before which our mortal Nature 
Doth tremble like a guilty thing surprised : 
Those first affections. 
Those shadowy recollections, 
Which, be they what they may, 
Are yet the fountain light of all our day." 

And so in fact we find it to be. The image 
of Jesus comes to light, first of all, in the 



Chris fs Mission to the Inner Life 97 

spiritual experience of man. The earliest and 
the most wonderful picture of Him is simply a 
living reflection of Him in man's inner life. 

Before we can discern any influence of His As many 
teaching, as a great reformer, upon the institu- ^^^^^^^^ 
tions of society; before we can perceive any 
effect of those large, simple truths which He 
brought to light, upon the orderly thinking of 
the world; before we can trace the rudest 
beginnings of Christian . art, the most ancient 
formulas of Christian worship, the earliest foun- 
dations of Christian temples ; yes, even before 
we can find any narrative of the life of Jesus, 
any collection of His sayings, any record of 
His deeds, — first of all, and most vivid of all, 
we see the person of Jesus printed upon the 
hearts and revealed in the letters of certain men 
who loved and trusted and adored Him as their 
Saviour from sin. 

Asa matter of fact, the Epistles come before The Epistles 
the Gospels. I do not say they are any more ""^^'^^^1^' ^^' 
authentic, any more precious, than the Gospels. 
I do not say they are ever to be read or inter- 
preted apart from the Gospels. But I say they 
are forever sacred and authoritative to all Chris- 
tian hearts, because they are the place where we 
first catch sight of Jesus Christ in this world. 
And their personal testimony, their peculiar sig- 



98 Chrisfs Mission to the Inner Life 



Christ their 
theme. 



Their wit- 
ness to His 
power. 



nificance, their religious meaning, must never 
be forgotten or denied, if we want to know 
what Christ came to do, and what Christ really 
did, for the life of man. 

For what are these Epistles? They are not 
formal treatises of theology, of ethics, of church 
government. They are simply transcripts of 
the spiritual experience of real men, — St. Peter 
and St. Paul and St. John, and perhaps some 
others whose names we do not know. 

No one can doubt that the centre of these 
letters is Jesus Christ. He is their theme and 
their inspiration, their impulse and their aim. 
They are written in His name. They bear wit- 
ness to His power, they glow with His praise. 
They are, first of all, and most of all, evidences 
of the place which Jesus held in the inner life 
of these men, testimonies to the change which 
He wrought in their souls, — a change so great, 
so deep, so joyful, that it was like a new birth, 
a veritable passing from death unto life. Listen 
to a description of this change, in words as fresh 
and glowing as if they had been written but 
yesterday : — 

"Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is 
a new creature : old things are passed away ; 
behold, all things are become new. And all 
things are of God, who hath reconciled us to 



Ohrisfs Mission to the Inner Life 99 

himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us 
the ministry of reconciliation; to wit, that 
God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto 
himself, not imputing their trespasses unto 
them; and hath committed unto us the word 
of reconciliation. Now then we are ambas- 
sadors for Christ, as though God did beseech 
you by us : we pray you in Christ's stead, be 
ye reconciled to God. For he hath made him to 
be sin for us, who knew no sin ; that we might 
be made the righteousness of God in him. " 

This is an authentic description of the mis- The original 
sion of Christ to the inner life of man. This is ^^^P^^- 
a reflection of what He really effected in the 
secret place of the human heart. This is the 
voice of that new tide of peace which silently 
rose through man's experience, — 

" One common wave of thought and joy 
Lifting mankind again." 

This is the original gospel, which began to win 
the world eighteen hundred years ago, and has 
never ceased to spread from heart to heart, 
from land to land, like music mixed with light. 
And it is the faithful and persistent witness 
to this experience, more than anything else, 
that has made Christianity a world-religion. 
A changed heart, uttering its new-found fe- 



100 Christ's Mission to the Inner Life 

licity in sweet and searching tones, — this is 
the miracle that has drawn the attention of 
men, century after century, to the teachings 
of Christianity. 
A joyful Its apostles won their way chiefly by the 

change. evidence which they gave that something had 
happened within them to transform their life 
at the fountain-head. The sense of newness 
in their souls was the source of their power. 
Whenever this sense of newness has faded and 
grown dim, the self -propagating force of Chris- 
tianity has waned. Whenever this sense of 
newness has been deep and vivid, Christianity 
has advanced swiftly and found a wide wel- 
come. Its most potent argument has been this 
simple and direct testimony to the pacification 
and renewal of the inner life by the accept- 
ance of Jesus Christ as the Saviour. 
What did it I am not concerned at present to justify it, 
to defend it, to argue for its truth or its mo- 
rality, to find a place for it in a system of 
theology or philosophy. What I want to do 
is just to tell what it was ; to show what it 
meant to the men who received it ; to look at 
it, not as a theory, not as a doctrine, but as a 
spiritual experience ; to let the inner life speak 
for itself about what Christ has done for the 
souls of those who have believed on Him. 



mean? 



Chrisfs Mission to the Inner Life 101 

in 

Peace with God through Christ 

That Christ's mission was one of joy and Thegiad- 

peace needs no proof. The New Testament !5f*.t"^ ., 
^ ^ Chnstiamty. 

is a book that throbs and glows with inexpres- 
sible gladness. It is the one bright spot in 
the literature of the first century. The Chris- 
tians were the happiest people in the world. 
Poor, they were rich ; persecuted, they were 
exultant ; martyred, they were victorious. The 
secret of Jesus, as they knew it, was a blessed 
secret. It filled them with the joy of living. 
Their watchword was, " Rejoice and be exceed- 
ing glad." 

But what were the elements of that joy? 
What was it that had entered into their inner 
life thus to transform and illuminate it ? 

To answer this question fully would be to Salvation. 
give a summary of the primitive records of 
Christianity. All the manifold aspects of hu- 
man existence were affected, unmistakably and 
immediately, by faith in Jesus Christ as the 
Son of God and the Saviour of men. Those 
who received Him thus into their hearts felt 
that they were saved. And if one had asked 
them from what they were saved, doubtless 



102 Chris fs Mission to the Inner Life 

they would have wondered at the question, and 
would have answered, "From everything that 
brings trouble and fear and anguish and death 
into our souls." 
All things The world looked to them like a new place, 
made new. ^^^ ^^^^ f^^^ ^ikQ new. men. Sorrow was 

changed. Instead of a hopeless burden of 
affliction, it had become the means of working 
out for them a far more exceeding and eternal 
weight of glory. Death was changed. In- 
stead of a gloomy shadow enveloping the end 
of all things, it had become the gateway into 
a world of light. Duty was changed. Instead 
of an impossible compliance with an inexora- 
ble law, it had become a new obedience with 
divine help to accomplish it. They felt that 
they had received power in the inner life to 
become the sons of God. And the chief ele- 
ment in this power, according to their own 
testimony, was the sense of deliverance from 
the weight, the curse, the condemnation of 
their sins, through the work of the Lord Jesus 
_ Christ. 

It is of this strange and wonderful feeling 
of salvation from sin that I wish to speak 
more particularly, not as a doctrine, not as a 
theory, but as an actual fact brought by Christ 
into the inner life of man. 



Chrises Mission to the Inner Life 103 

1. The normal Christian experience, as it Sin taken 
is expressed by those who stand nearest to ^^"^' 
Christ, utters itself, first of all, as a great 
sense of peace with God through something 
which Christ has done to sweep away the 
barrier of sin between the human and the 
divine. 

Nowhere else in the world do we find such 
a deep and keen sense of sin, and of its three 
deadly facts, as Henry Drummond calls them, 
— its power, its stain, and its guilt ; nowhere 
else in the world do we find these facts so 
clearly recognized, so profoundly felt, as in 
the New Testament. 

In many of our modern religious writers this 
sense of sin seems to be a vanishing quantity. 
Mr. Gladstone says: ''They appear to have 
a very low estimate both of the quantity and 
the quality of sin ; of its amount, spread like 
a deluge over the world, and of the subtlety, 
intensity, and virulence of its nature." ^ It is 
chiefly in the secular writers, the dramatists 
like Ibsen, the novelists like Hardy, that we 
find a full and clear recognition of the facts 
of moral evil to-day. And they offer no 
remedy, give no hope. 

But when we turn back to the New Testa- 
1 W. E. Gladstone, Later Gleanings, p. 114. 



104 Christ's Mission to the Inner Life 

ment we come into touch with men who faced 
the facts, and, at the same time, felt that they 
had found the cure. 
The deep- Nothing that Jesus said or did, led His 

^of^sin^^^ disciples to minimize or disregard sin, to cover 
it up with flowers, to transform it into a mere 
defect or mistake, to deny its reality and 
explain it away, to say 

" The evil is naught, is null, is silence implying sound." 

The whole effect of His mission, whatever form 
it may have taken, whatever its teaching may 
have been, — its undeniable effect was to inten- 
sify and deepen the consciousness of sin as a 
fatal thing from which men must needs be saved. 
" This is the condemnation," says St. John, 
"that light is come into the world, and men 
loved darkness rather than light, because their 
deeds were evil."^ "All have sinned and 
come short of the glory of God," says St. 
Paul ; " death passed upon all men, for that 
all have sinned." ^ "For whosoever shall keep 
the whole law," says St. James, "and yet 
offend in one point, he is guilty of all."^ "If 
we say we have not sinned," says St. John, " we 
make God a liar and his truth is not in us."* 

1 John iii. 19. ^ James ii. 10. 

2 Bom. V. 12. * 1 John i. 10. 



Christ's Mission to the Inner Life 105 

But with this overwhelming sense of sin The perfect 
which Christ brought into the inner life, He ^^^^"*^' 
brought also an equally great and deep sense 
of deliverance from it. 

"There is therefore now no condemnation 
to them that are in Christ Jesus, who walk 
not after the flesh but after the Spirit."^ 
"And you, being dead in your sins, hath he 
quickened together with him, having forgiven 
you all trespasses." 2 If any man "have com- 
mitted sins, they shall be forgiven unto him." ^ 
"I write unto you, little children, because 
your sins are forgiven you for his name's 
sake."* 

Now it is an extraordinary thing that men 
should speak thus, in one breath condemning 
themselves and in the next breath declaring 
their freedom from condemnation. And when 
we come to look into this strange utterance 
of the inner life, we find that it flows from 
a twofold experience. 

2. First of all, there is a profound, unalter- The cer- 

able conviction that the life and death of Jesus !?*!!f^y 

Goa s love. 

Christ are an expression of the forgiving love 
of God toward man. The old idea of God 
as a stern, angry, revengeful being, demand- 

1 Rom. Yiii. 1. s James v. 15. 

2 Col. ii. 13. * 1 John ii. 12. 



106 Christ's Mission to the Inner Life 

ing and delighting in the death of the sinner, 
has vanished from the inner life of the true 
Christian. Somehow Christ has blotted it out. 
Somehow the Christian knows that God is 
love. And if we ask how he knows it, the 
answer is, that the only begotten Son came 
forth from the bosom of the Father to reveal 
Him. ''Herein is love, not that we loved 
God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son 
to be the propitiation for our sins."^ "God 
commendeth his love toward us, in that while 
we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."^ All 
the meaning of Christ's life and death, with 
us and for us, hangs upon His being the true 
Son of God, the word of God, the brightness 
of the Father's glory and the express image 
of His person. 3 It is this that makes us sure 
that God is not a fierce, vindictive, relentless 
God. He is more than a ruler, a judge of all 
the earth, an almighty king. He is our friend, 
the lover of our souls. He is willing to live 
among us, to suffer with us, to die for us. 
Christ one The entire significance of Christ as a reve- 
lation of divine Love depends upon His real 
oneness with the Father, and the essential vol- 
untariness of His sacrifice. It is not a punish- 

1 1 John iv. 10. 2 Rom. v. 8. 

3 Gospel for an Age of Doubt, pp. 105, 120. 



with the 
Father. 



Christ's Mission to the Inner Life 107 

ment inflicted from without, by the inexorable 
law of God. It is a revelation made from 
within, by the immeasurable love of God, 
showing mercy at the heart of righteousness. 

The faith in Christ's divinity underlies the 
faith in His sacrifice as an expression of the 
kindness of God's heart. It could not speak 
to us of the love of God unless the love of God 
were in it. Love is the light within the lan- 
tern. There would be no colour in the glass, 
the figure of the crucifix would be black and 
indistinguishable, if it were not transfigured 
by that inner radiance. 

The love of God goes before the gift of Love the 
Christ. " God so loved the world that he gave ^^«^^«^^^f- 
his only begotten Son." He did not give His 
only begotten Son in order that He might learn 
to love the world. 

The love was expressed not only in the life, 
it was summed up and crowned in the death, of 
Christ. " Greater love hath no man than this, 
that a man lay down his life for his friends." 
Greater love hath no god than this. Love's 
consummation is the cross. 

It is not intended to produce a change in 
the mind of God. It is intended to show what 
is already in the mind of God. It is not 
designed to make Him feel differently toward 



108 Ohrisfs Mission to the Inner Life 



Forgiveness 
and repent- 
ance. 



Christ did 
not make 
God love the 
world. 



men. It is designed to reveal what He has 
always felt. It is not love's manufacture. It 
is love's disclosure. 

Men say that repentance is the condition of 
forgiveness. Only let a man repent of his sin, 
only let him be sorry for it, and hate it, and 
turn to God, crying for pardon, and he shall be 
forgiven. This is a glorious, an inspiring view 
of the readiness of divine mercy. 

But the picture of Jesus in the soul, as it is 
drawn in the New Testament, goes far beyond 
the glory of this thought. It shows us that 
in Christ forgiveness is the creator of repent- 
ance. God is ready to forgive long before man 
is ready to repent. God gives His Son to die 
for us while we are yet sinners. At the heart 
of the gift lies the desire to make us sorry for 
our sins. " The goodness of God leadeth thee 
to repentance."^ To forgive is divine; that 
comes first. To repent is human ; that follows 
afterward. 

In all the New Testament I can find no trace 
of the idea that Christ did anything, or needed 
to do anything, to make God love the world. 

There is a noble passage in the works of 
St. Augustine, which sets forth the true image 
of Christ as the expression of God's readiness 
1 Rom. ii. 4. 



Chrises Mission to the Inner Life 109 

to forgive sins. "What is meant," he asks, 
"by 'being reconciled by the death of his 
Son ' ? Was it, indeed, so that when God the 
Father was angry with us He saw the death of 
His Son, and was appeased? Was, then, the 
Son already so appeased toward us that He 
was willing to die for us; while the Father 
was so angry that unless the Son had died He 
would not have been appeased ? What does it 
mean, then, when the same teacher of the Gen- 
tiles says, in another place, ' What shall we say 
to these things? If God be for us, who can 
be against us? He that spared not his own 
Son but freely delivered him up for us all, how 
has he not with him also freely given us all 
things ? ' Unless the Father had been already 
appeased, would He have delivered up His own 
Son, not sparing Him for us ? Is there not a 
contradiction between these two views ? In 
the former the Son dies for us, and the Father 
is reconciled by His death. In the latter the 
Father, as if out of love for us, does not spare 
the Son, but Himself, for our sake, delivers 
Him up to death. But I see that the Father 
loved us beforehand, — not only before the Son 
died, but also before the world was createdj 
according to the testimony of the Apostle who 
says, ' He hath chosen us in him before the 



110 Christ's Mission to the Inner Life 



God's love, 
antedates 
atonement. 



The neces- 
sity of 
sacrifice. 



foundation of the world.' Nor was the Son 
unwillingly offered, for it is said of Him, ' Who 
loved me, and gave himself for me.' There- 
fore together, both the Father and the Son, 
and the Spirit of both, work all things at the 
same time equally and harmoniously ; yet we 
are justified in the blood of Christ, and we are 
reconciled to God by the death of His Son."i 

So stands the picture of Christ the mediator, 
the reconciler, as it is reflected in the soul of 
those who first trusted in Him. 

His atonement does not reconcile God to the 
world. No need of that. God has loved, the 
world forever. 

It does reconcile the world to God. Great 
need of that. For it breaks down the barrier 
of fear and mistrust ; it rends the veil of dread- 
ful dreams that sin has woven before the divine 
face, and discloses the countenance of a pitying, 
forgiving Father ; it moves men to repentance 
by the mightiest force of mercy ; it binds men 
to holy living by the enduring bonds of grati- 
tude and love. 

3. But could the sacrifice of Christ have 
meant this much to the inner life of man unless 
it had also meant something more ? Suppose for 
a moment that the disciples had thought that it 

1 Augustine, De Trinitate, Book XIII. ch. xi. 



Ohrisfs Mission to the Inner Life 111 

was not really a necessary sacrifice ; that there 
was no reason why He should suffer, except 
perhaps that His sufferings might move their 
hearts ; that His death was nothing more than 
the accidental consequence of His being entan- 
gled in a world like this ; that God could have 
forgiven sin and would have forgiven sin in just 
the same way if there had been no crucifixion 
on Calvary. What then ? Would Christ still 
have had the same atoning power to draw their 
hearts to God ? 

It is love that reconciles. And it is self- Love always 
sacrifice that reveals love. But does an un- ^^^^*^^^ ^• 
necessary sacrifice, a useless sacrifice, reveal love 
in a way that moves and compels our hearts ? 

No, the moment we perceive that an offered 
proof of love has no relation to our real needs, 
and is not intended to do us any real good, it 
loses its power upon us, becomes unreal and 
futile. Suppose, for example, that you are 
rowing a boat on a river, in no danger of any 
kind. A friend comes down to the shore and 
hails you ; he tells you that he is about to 
show his devotion to you in a way that you 
cannot possibly doubt. He intends to give 
his life for you. So he throws himself into 
the water and is drowned. Are you impressed 
with gratitude and love? Is the proof of de- 



112 Christ'' s Mission to the Inner Life 

votion so manifest and indubitable that you 
cannot resist it? Does it not seem more like 
a vain show of heroism, a display made not so 
much for your sake as for the sake of him who 
made it? 

But if your boat had. been sinking? Ah, 
then it would have been another matter. 
The man who gives up his life to rescue you 
from an actual peril, commands your love be- 
^ -...^ cause he is your saviour. The crown of love is 
service. The glory of sacrifice is usefulness. 
The love of Christ, the sacrifice of Christ, draw 
their deepest power upon the inner life of man 
from the conviction they really have accom- 
plished a deliverance for sinners from the guilt 
and curse and doom of sin. 
The inter- The first message that the disciples received 

pretationof fj.Qjn ^he risen Jesus, while their minds were 
still overwhelmed by the apparent tragedy of 
the crucifixion, was the truth that it was not a 
useless loss, but a fruitful gain. The subject 
of His conversation with the two sad-hearted 
Christians on the road to Emmaus, — sad be- 
cause they could not see why it was necessary 
for Christ to die, — the theme of His talk with 
them was the need of His death. "Ought not 
Christ to have suffered these things and to 
have entered into His glory ? " 



Ohrisfs Mission to the Inner Life 113 

How much the first Apostles, who had been The tragedy 
with Jesus from the beginning, who had loved ^^ Calvary. 
Him and trusted that He was the promised 
Redeemer of Israel, — how much these men 
needed this gospel of a real victory in His 
death, we who have always heard it, even 
though we may not have believed in it, can 
hardly realize. Think what it must have 
meant to see the holy and loving Master die 
upon the cross. What a crushing catastrophe, 
what an inexplicable tragedy, what an irrepara- 
ble loss for the world ! How was it possible to 
have any trust in the wisdom and goodness of 
a God who would permit such a cruel disaster ? 
How was it possible to have any hope for a 
humanity which had no other use for the per- 
fect life than to blot it out in anguish and 
disgrace? Faith itself must have died with 
Christ, unless it had been able to discover a 
meaning, a purpose, a necessity, a triumph in 
His death great enough to make it the accom- 
plishment of all that He had lived for. A bit- 
ter waste, or an unspeakable gain : those were 
the alternatives in the cross. 

One would think that the words of Jesus Christ's 
while He was with the disciples had been clear P^^f'^^""^-^ 

^ victorious 

enough to show them which was the true ex- death. 
planation. He had spoken of His death as 



114 Christ's Mission to the Inner Life 



The doubts 
of the 
disciples. 



The alterna- 
tive. 



inevitable ; He had moved forward to it as the 
fulfilment of His mission ; He had interpreted 
it as an infinite benefit to His disciples. "The 
Son of man came to give his life a ransom for 
many." "The bread that I will give is my 
flesh, which I will give for the life of the 
world." "Except a corn of wheat fall into the 
ground and die, it abideth alone ; but if it die, 
it bringeth forth much fruit." " I, if I be lifted 
up, will draw all men unto me." "This cup is 
the New Covenant in my blood which is shed 
for many for the remission of sins." 

But the meaning of these words was withheld 
from their eyes. They did not dare, they were 
not willing to look the fact of Christ's coming 
death in the face, as He did. So its signifi- 
cance escaped them. It needed the lifting up 
of the cross, it needed the vision of the Master's 
death, to make them realize the true alternative. 

On Calvary all was lost, — unless, on Calvary 
all was won ! The disciples stood between 
utter despair and immeasurable hope. The 
risen Lord came back to tell them that all 
was won by the needful sacrifice of the cross. 
That is the testimony of the first Apostles. 

Paul's testimony comes out of a different 
experience but leads to the same result. He 
had been an unbeliever in Jesus, a hater and 



Chrisfs Mission to the Inner Life 115 

a persecutor of the Nazarene. To him the man PauVs 
of Nazareth had appeared as a false prophet, ^^i'^^^^^c^- 
a blasphemer. He found no fault with the 
death of Jesus from that point of view. It 
was not only necessary ; it was desirable. 
Paul would have willingly consented to it, if 
he had been in the palace of Caiaphas, and 
in the judgment-hall of Pilate, and on the 
hill called Golgotha. 

But when Paul was overwhelmingly con- 
vinced that he was wrong in his judgment of 
the Nazarene, his old point of view was utterly 
destroyed. 

From the eternal moment on the Damascus The changed 
road when Paul saw that the crucified Jesus P^^^^'^f 

view. 

whom he had been persecuting was not a here- 
tic Jew, justly slain for his blasphemies, but 
f he true and living Christ of God, — from that 
moment it became absolutely necessary for him 
to find a new interpretation of the cross. He 
never dreamed that it could be regarded as 
a mere incident, a needless sacrifice, a dis- 
astrous close of a beautiful life. It must be 
an essential element, an indispensable factor 
in the mission of the Messiah. It must com- 
plete the revelation of God which was made 
in Him. It must be the corner-stone of that 
divine kingdom which He came to establish. 



116 Christ's Mission to the Inner Life 

The start' This was the starting-point of Paul's theol- 

tismlfy. ^^y- W^i^® ^^ thought that Jesus was not 
the Christ, he saw in the death on the cross 
nothing but the punishment of the folly and 
falsehood of the Nazarene. As soon as he 
was convinced that Jesus really was the Christ, 
the death on the cross was transformed into 
the revelation of the righteousness and love of 
God. There was no other alternative. The 
sinless one, the glorious one, did not die for 
sins of His own. He could not have died in 
vain. Therefore He must have died for us. 
God was manifest in Him reconciling the world 
unto Himself. 
The Chris- This was certainly the interpretation which 
tianviewof ^^^ Christians put upon the death of their holy 

the cross. ^ ^ *^ 

Lord and Master on the cross. This was the 
effect that it actually wrought in their inner 
life. They did not deem it an accident, nor a 
catastrophe. It was not the defeat, nor merely 
the termination, of His work. It was the 
crown and consummation of His work. It 
gave Christ to them more than it took Him 
from them. They did not think that He died 
for naught. His death for sinners was the 
greatest service that love could perform. It 
accomplished and declared God's righteousness 
in the remission of sins that are past. It made 



Christ's Mission to the Inner Life 111 

it possible for God to be just and the justifier 
of him which believeth in Jesus. 

The Apostles did not teach that forgiveness 
could not have taken place without the cruci- 
fixion of Christ. They kept within the horizon 
of experience. They testified of what they 
knew, and bore witness of what they had seen. 

They simply taught that, without the death The effect 
of Christ, forgiveness would not have been j^ ,^*^ * 
what it is. They taught it because they felt 
it. They did not dream that the tragedy of 
the cross made any change in God. But they 
were sure that it made a change in the relation 
of the sinful world to God. It took away the 
curse of the law. It blotted out the hand- 
writing of ordinances. It redeemed us. It 
brought us near to God. It put away sin. It 
cleansed us from sin in the blood of Christ. 
It is the one offering by which Christ hath 
perfected them that are sanctified. 

Now, what were the secret laws and what The hidden 
were the mysterious relations of the world to 
God which made this offering of the sinless life 
of Jesus necessary for the rescue of mankind 
from sin, no man knoweth, nor can any man 
explain them and set them in order. But their 
existence does not depend upon our knowledge 
of them. Nor is the satisfaction of them ren- 



relations. 



118 Christ's Mission to the Inner Life 



The founda- 
tion of 
peace. 



dered unreal by our ignorance of the way in 
which they are satisfied. If God is such a 
lofty being as the moral ruler of a universe 
must be, it is not to be expected that we should 
be able to fathom the necessities which are 
present to His mind. There must be a world of 
eternal laws and wants and needs lying about 
us of which we can form no adequate con- 
ception. Into this world Christ entered by His 
death. Whatever was needed there for the 
forgiveness and blotting out of man's sin He 
provided. Whatever the law required for its 
righteous vindication He performed. It was 
the Father's will that He should die to redeem 
men ; and so He died, and men were redeemed. 
Thus the atonement appears in the New 
Testament. Not only from the side of man, 
but also from the side of God, it is the su- 
premely necessary, and the supremely success- 
ful, peace-making sacrifice. " Therefore, being 
justified by faith, we have peace with God 
through our Lord Jesus Christ." 



Christ's Mission to the Inner Life 119 

IV 

Newness of Life 

What forgiveness would have been without What 
Christ (if it were possible), no man knows. ^Zngs""''' 

What forgiveness is in Christ, what it means 
to "have redemption through his blood, even 
the forgiveness of sins," — this the gospel that 
rings like music through the whole New Tes- 
tament. It is inward peace, and secret joy, and 
newness of life. 

An experience like this cannot possibly be 
expressed in any language which is fixed and 
formal. It must utter itself in vital speech 
because it is a vital experience. The attempt 
to transform any of the glowing words which 
the Apostles use to describe it into a cool, ab- 
stract, scientific definition inevitably results in 
a misrepresentation. The attempt to interpret 
any of the terms which are associated with the 
experience of atonement as if they described 
legal transactions or artificial adjustments de- 
stroys their real significance as utterances of 
conscious life. 

Take, for example, Paul's famous phrase, justiftca- 
"justified by faith." Suppose we attempt to ^^^I'J^ 
define that by making it mean that the guilt 



120 Christ'' 8 Mission to the Inner Life 

of the sinner has been legally transferred to 
Christ, and the merits of Christ have been 
legally transferred to the sinner; so that 
Christ on the cross is declared guilty and is 
punished for sin, while the sinner, believing, is 
pronounced righteous and escapes from punish- 
ment. What effect would such an idea of the 
atonement have upon the inner life? Apart 
from the frightful confusion which it must 
introduce into the moral sense to think of 
God as the author of such an arrangement, 
what conceivable influence of a real and per- 
manent nature could such a thought have upon 
the soul? Does it bring inward happiness to 
a man's heart to be pronounced righteous when 
he knows that he is still unrighteous? Does 
it give a man inward peace to be set free from 
punishment when he is conscious that the evils 
which deserved it are still within him ? Does 
it reconcile a man's inner life with God to have 
the righteousness of another person attributed 
to him by a legal fiction, while his own soul 
is still out of harmony with God? 
No fiction Merely to put these questions is to see the 

m Christ's answer to them. No ; if Christ's mission is 
mission. 

to the inner life, then His work in the inner 

life must be real and vital. In this region 

there is no room for anything that is merely 



Ohrisfs Mission to the Inner Life 121 

formal and artificial. There is no room for 
what Phillips Brooks calls " the fantastic con- 
ception of the imputation to Christ of a sin- 
fulness which was not His, of God*s counting 
Him guilty of wickedness which He had never 
done." 

There is no legal fiction in the real atone- 
ment. 

God is not a maker of fiction, nor can the 
inner life of man be satisfied with formalities. 
The human heart revolts at the idea of the 
punishment of the innocent in the place of the 
guilty. Those instincts which lie deeper than 
all reasoning, are insulted and wounded by the 
thought of the arbitrary transfer of the merits 
of one person to the credit of another person. 
The moral sense could never find peace in the 
contemplation of such a purely forensic trans- 
action. 

But the testimony of the Apostles is that Bighteous- 
their moral sense, their conscience, actually ^^^^T' 
did find peace through the atonement as they 
believed in it. "Justification by faith," as 
they use the words, must therefore mean some- 
thing very different from the definition which 
has sometimes been given to it. It must mean 
that righteousness is not merely imputed, but 
actually imparted through faith. It must mean 



122 Ohrisfs Mission to the Inner Life 



A neiv 
obedience. 



Faith 
counted 
unto right- 
eousness. 



that sinners are not merely declared just, but 
actually made just, by Christ's work as the 
Saviour. It is not justification of law, it is 
"justification of life."^ 

There is not a single passage in the New 
Testament where the merits of one person are 
transferred, or reckoned, or counted to another. 
But there are a hundred passages where the 
righteousness and obedience of Christ are 
spoken of as the source of a new righteous- 
ness, a new obedience in us. "How much 
more shall the blood of Christ purge your con- 
science from dead works to serve the living 
God." 2 "Elect according to the foreknow- 
ledge of God the Father, through sanctification 
of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of 
the blood of Christ." ^ " Our Saviour Jesus 
Christ, who gave himself for us that he might 
redeem us from all iniquity and purify unto 
himself a peculiar people, zealous of good 
works."* "If we walk in the light as he is in 
the light, we have fellowship one with another, 
and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth 
us from all sin." ^ 

What, then, does Paul mean when he says 
that " faith is counted for righteousness " ? ® 



1 Rom. V. 18. 

2 Heb. ix. 14. 



8 1 Pet. i. 2. 
* Titus ii. 14. 



6 1 John i. 7. 
^ Rom. iv. 5. 



Christ's Mission to the Inner Life 123 

He means not that faith is taken in the place 
of righteousness, as if it were enough for a 
man to believe that Christ was holy without 
making any effort to attain to holiness himself. 
He means that faith is regarded as an actual 
beginning of righteousness, a seed of divine 
promise and power in the soul of man, to be 
unfolded, by the grace of God, into a holy 
life.i He means that there is infinitely more 
hope and potency of goodness in the man who 
trusts in God's mercy to save him, and in God's 
holiness to purify him, and in God's grace to 
make him righteous, than there is in the man 
who tries to work out salvation in his own 
strength according to the law. This is Paul's 
personal consciousness of the atonement. It 
is not the peace of death : it is the peace of 
new life joined to God. It involves a spiritual 
crucifixion with Christ unto sin. It involves 
also a real resurrection with Christ unto right- 
eousness. " Therefore we are buried with him 
by baptism into death, that like as Christ was 
raised up from the dead by the glory of the 
Father, even so we should walk in newness of 
life." 2 

1 Marvin E. Vincent, Word- Studies in the New Testa- 
ment, Vol. III., p. 52. 

2 Rom. vi. 4. 



124 Christ's Mission to the Inner Life 

Newness of life^ — new hopes, new powers, 
new inspiration, new courage, — that is the 
practical side of regeneration. And that, ac- 
cording to the New Testament, is the result of 
the atonement which Christ brings into the 
inner life of man. 
PauVs Paul was certainly the one writer among the 

itgalism. Apostles who took the most legal point of view 
in considering the work of Christ. His tem- 
perament, his training, inclined him to this 
method of thought and expression. He was 
the lawyer of the gospel. But Paul never for 
a moment dreamed that his forensic figures of 
speech exhausted or limited the meaning of the 
gospel. 

Nothing could be more absurd, more false to 
the facts, than to make the message of Paul a 
mere gospel of escape from the law by belief in 
the vicarious sacrifice of Christ. Such a view 
of his gospel would make it and keep it a purely 
legal gospel. Satisfaction of the law would be 
still its main theme and motive. It would 
differ from the religion of the Pharisees only 
in the way in which it proposed to satisfy the 
law. It would present a view of justification 
based upon a different ground indeed, but 
which in its results, if they did not go beyond 
escape from the law, would be just as incom- 



Christ's Mission to the Inner Life 125 

plete, just as formal, just as dead, as justifica- 
tion by works. 

Paul's message was certainly a gospel of PauVs 
escape from the law ; but it was that because f ^"^^ *^^^ 
it was something infinitely more. It was a 
gospel of escape into life. 

This was the new birth that came to him 
when he saw Christ. In the old life his chief 
concern had been to fulfil the demands of the 
law; and that was not really a life at all; 
it was a kind of death, not only because it 
was a hopeless struggle, but also because it 
was a subordination of the inward to the out- 
ward, of the vital to the formal, of the spirit 
to the letter. In the new life Paul felt that 
he was set free from the task of fulfilling the 
law, not merely because Christ had satisfied 
all its conceivable demands, but also because 
Christ had brought him into an utterly dif- 
ferent relation to God; not outward, but in- 
ward ; not formal, but vital ; not artificial, but 
spiritual. 

Paul's message was more than a doctrine of The new 
law satisfied in Christ. It was a proclamation j^l^j^f^l^g, 
of life begun in Christ. There was as much ness. 
righteousness in this new life as there was in 
the old law. But it was a new kind of right- 
eousness. Certainly it was not a fictitious 



126 Christ'' s Mission to the Inner Life 

kind of righteousness, a mere legal justifica- 
tion, a formal transfer of the merits of Christ, 
by some mysterious decree of a supreme court, 
to the credit of the believer. It was a real 
righteousness, living and working itself out 
in the life of man. But it differed from the 
old righteousness in two things. First, in its 
origin : it was not human, but divine ; and 
therefore it must be received by faith. Sec- 
ond, in its operation ; it was not conformity 
to a rule, but guidance by the Spirit; and 
therefore it must be perfected by love. 
Salvation Paul's teaching amounts to this. We are 

through ^^^ saved through law ; we are saved through 

It/Cm 

life. Life does not mean outward obedience. 
That is only the shell of life. Keal life means 
faith and hope and love. The only source 
of this life is in God. Christ alone brings 
this life near to us, makes it accessible, sweeps 
away all hindrances, and invites us to enter 
into it by giving ourselves entirely to him. 
To live, according to Paul, means to believe 
in Christ, to hope in Christ, and to love 
Christ, because He is the human life of God, 
"delivered for our offences and raised again 
for our justification." 1 

Mark well the words. Why ^^ raised again 
1 Rom. iv. 25. 



Ohrisfs Mission to the Inner Life 127 

for our justification? ^^ If the taking away of The living 
our sins means only the release from their ^*^*' 
punishment because He has borne them upon the 
cross, then His resurrection makes no difference 
in the resiilt. If our justification means only 
the imputation of the merit of His obedience 
and the value of His sacrifice to our account, 
then His rising again from the dead has noth- 
ing to do with it. Everything would be secure, 
whether He rose, or whether He did not rise. 
Why '-'raised again for our justification V 
Because the taking away of our sins means 
an actual separation from sin by union with 
the crucified Christ. Because our justification 
means a living entrance into His righteousness 
in the risen life. The mission of Christ to the 
inner life was just this : To make such an 
atonement that sin should no more divide the 
soul from God ; To make such an atonement 
that the broken law should no more keep the 
soul at enmity with God : To make such an 
atonement that the inner life of all who truly 
live, should be " not unto themselves, but unto 
him who died for them and rose again." 



V 

THE PEKFECTION OF ATONEMENT 



We may not know, we cannot tell, 

What pains He had to bear ; 
But we believe it was for us 

He hung and suiffered there. 

He died that we might be forgiven ; 

He died to make us good, 
That we might go at last to heaven 

Saved by His precious blood. 

— Cecil Frances Alexander. 



THE PERFECTION OF ATONEMENT 

Atonement is the word that seems best Theatone- 
fitted to express the meaning of the gospel of ^Q^Q^^ed!^ 
Christ in relation to a world of sin. I have 
used it thus far without defining it, for three 
reasons. 

First, because a final definition is impossible. 
The work of Christ for the saving of sinners 
can never be confined within the phrases which 
men invent to describe what they can see of 
it. It overflows the boundaries. Its fulness 
makes it indefinable. 

Second, because the very attempt to define Ofthe 

it has so often led to misconception and ^^^^^Sfof 

f ^ _ many books. 
strife between men who believed in it with 

equal sincerity. I have read many books on 

the atonement. If the titles and references 

were given here, they would fill several pages. 

In almost all of these books I have found 

truth; in none of them the whole truth. The 

writers have helped me most when they have 

expressed their own experience of the saving 

131 



132 



The Perfection of Atonement 



Clearness 

loithout 

definition. 



power of Christ. They have helped me least 
when they have been making definitions to 
shut out and condemn the views of other 
writers. Yet even in this they have not been 
altogether unprofitable. An attack upon a 
book has often led me to read it sympatheti- 
cally, and so to discover in it a new source 
of illumination, a new testimony of experi- 
ence. 

The third reason why I have not tried to 
give a definition of the atonement is because 
it is not needed. The word is clear enough 
and plain enough already. It denotes a cer- 
tain mystery, — the entire work of Christ in 
reuniting man to God, — the perfect result of 
that work in the establishment of peace be- 
tween man and God, — the redeeming relation 
of that work to human sin, — the satisfying 
relation of that work to divine righteousness, 
— it denotes a mystery, but it denotes it in 
language which brings it into analogy with 
things that we know, and throws upon it light 
enough to enable us to see at least some of its 
essential elements. 

For what is this word, and where does it 
0/ the word. ^^^^ £^^^ 9 j^ ^Qj^gg directly out of human 

life and experience. It is derived from an 
older word, '' otiement,'' which means unity or 



The history 



The Perfection of Atonement 133 

concord.i To set two persons or things "at 
onement" means to bring them together in 
harmony after discord. Atonement is simply 
the process, or the result of reuniting and 
reconciling those who have been separated. 
Thus, in Shakespeare's Bichard III.^ Bucking- 
ham says to the Queen: 

" Ay, madame ; he desires to make atonement 
Between the Duke of Gloster and your brothers." 

From this original and broadest meaning, the 
word is sometimes narrowed a little to denote 
some particular action or offering by which the 
reconciliation is effected. It may come either 
from one of the separated parties, or from a 
third person who offers himself as a reconciler. 
But in any case three elements must always 
enter into the idea of an atonement. 

First, the motive of it must be love. It Three eU 
cannot possibly spring from any other cause. 
Justice, or righteousness, or authority, — and 
least of all anger or hate, — would never 
account for the desire of making a reconcilia- 
tion. It can only come from a sincere love 

1 " Ye witten gallants, I beshrew your hearts 

Which make such discord 'twixt agreeing parts, 
Which never can be set at onement more." 

Bishop Hall's Satires, 1599. 



merits in all 
atonement. 



134 The Perfection of Atonement 

for the persons to be reconciled, and an earnest 
wish that they shall love each other. 

Second, the condition under which this love 
works is the sense of a present separation, 
arising out of a fault, an offence, which has 
created a real obstacle between the persons 
who are in enmity. 

Third, the purpose which this love has in 
view is a real state of harmony, in which the 
persons who are to be brought together shall 
be vitally at one. 

/ These, then, are the three marks of all atone- 
1 ment. Its creative cause is the power of love. 
I Its occasional cause is the recognition of an 
\ offence. Its final cause is the restoration of 
vital union. 
Lesser \ Atonements have been going on in the world 

atonements, j^^^^ ^^iq beginning; between man and man, and 
between man and God. Those who have been 
conscious of injury and offence against their 
fellow-men have been trying to make some 
reparation, to show some contrition for the 
wrong, and to reestablish peace. Those who 
have been grieved at the prevalence of enmity 
and strife among their friends have been try- 
ing to bring about reconciliation, by mediating 
between the offended and the offender. 

This mediation involves suffering and sacri- 



The Perfection of Atonement 135 

fice on the part of the peacemaker. It is 
hardly possible to obtain forgiveness and love 
for a guilty person without bearing something 
of his pain and punishment. Many a father has 
suffered for the sake of making peace among his 
children who were at strife. Many a mother 
has borne not only grief, but also actual trouble 
and loss, for the sake of reconciling a rebellious 
boy to an offended father. Many a brother has 
shared the disgrace and paid the debts of a 
brother, for the sake of bringing him back into 
the harmony of the social order. And in such 
sufferings of love for the cause of atonement 
there is always something which propitiates the 
heart and inclines it to show favour. The 
father's compassion toward an erring son is 
always deepened and quickened by the thought 
of the mother's love as expressed in sacrifice. 
The sentiment of society, which after all is the 
final earthly court of appeal in all questions of 
conduct, is certainly affected favourably toward 
an offender by the fact that an innocent friend 
is willing to stand beside him and share in 
some degree the consequences of his fault. 
All this is of the nature of atonement, and 
there is no corner of the world where the let- 
ters of this word may not be spelled out, like 
a dim and broken inscription, on the fragments 
of human life. 



136 



The Perfection of Atonement 



Sacrifices 
for sin. 



Atonement 
in the Old 
Testament. 



The same word runs through the history of 
religion from the beginning until now. Sacri- 
fice is another way of spelling it ; and sacrifice 
is primitive and universal. 

"Both for themselves and those who call 
them friend" men have not only prayed, but 
also presented gifts and offerings to God, in 
the desire to take away the obstacle of sin and 
reconcile the human heart to Him. 

Atonement is spoken of in the Old Testa- 
ment in many places. It is said that an atone- 
ment was made when Moses interceded for the 
people at Sinai,^ when Aaron burned incense 
in the midst of the congregation,^ when Phine- 
has executed judgment on Zimri,^ and when 
Nehemiah established ordinances in the restored 
city of Jerusalem.* The Hebrew word which 
is used in these passages, and in many others 
where some form of the verb " to atone " occurs 
in our English version, is from a root which 
means "to cover." It carries with it the idea 
of guilt which needs to be expiated. But the 
object of the expiation is the renewal of fellow- 
ship between man and God. Sacrifice has this 
twofold meaning. The slaying of the victim 
is the confession that sin deserves punishment. 



1 Ex. xxxii. 30. 

2 Num. xvi. 46. 



3 Num. XXV. 13. 

4 Neh. X. 33. 



The Perfeetioyi of Atonement 137 

The offering of the blood, which is the sign of 
the life, is the utterance of the worshipper's 
desire to return into union with God.^ 

Now all these kinds of atonement, which men The figures 
have been making through the centuries, and ^"^ 
are making still, are but shadows and reflections 
of the great work which Christ came to do for 
a sinful world. Its purpose and design, its 
nature and conditions, the depth of its motive 
and the breadth of its scope, cannot be ex- 
pressed by any lesser, narrower, more precise 
word. 

It takes up into itself the significance of all The final 
sincere and pure sacrifices which have been ^^^'^^fi^^- 
offered on human altars, visible and invisible. 
Christ is the eternal embodiment of the sacri- 
ficial spirit.2 

It utters the great peace-making desire of The great 

all those blessed human mediators who have ■^^^^^" 

maTcer. 

laboured and suffered to tring together divided 
hearts and to restore harmony between discor- 
dant lives.^ In this light it reveals Christ as 
standing between God and man, and touching 
both the human and the divine. 

It- is the perfect consummation of all those The High 

imperfect offerings which have been made in ^^^^^\^f 
^ ° mankind. 

1 Lux Mundi, pp. 279 ff. 2 nelb. ix. 26. 

8 Eph. ii. 14-18. 



138 The Perfection of Atonement 

behalf of those who are guilty, to propitiate 
One who has a right to be offended with them. 
In this sense Christ appears as the High Priest 
of sinful and repentant humanity. ^ 
Theforgiv- It is the divine interpretation and consecra- 

^ola^^^^ ^^ *^^^ ^^ ^ ^^°^® ^^^^^ ^^^^ ^^ compassion and 
mercy in which men and women who have 
been sinned against have expressed their free 
forgiveness and sought to win their enemies 
back to peace. In this aspect Christ is re- 
vealed as the incarnate love of God, coming 
forth from the bosom of the Father, to seek 
and to save His lost children.^ 

No word which fails to cover all these mean- 
ings, no word which sharply emphasizes one 
side of the truth at the expense of the other 
sides, no word which leaves out of its signifi- 
cance the sweetness of any of those things most 
" pure and lovely and of good report '* which 
have been done in the spirit of reconciliation, is 
broad enough to describe the work of Christ 
in closing the gulf which sin had made between 
man and God. Sacrifice is not broad enough. 
Mediation is not broad enough. Propitiation 
is not broad enough. Redemption is not broad 
enough. Substitution is not broad enough. 
Satisfaction is not broad enough. Embracing 
1 Heb, X. 10-14. 2 1 John iii. 16. 



The Perfection of Atonement 139 

all these things, Christ's work goes beyond 
them all. It is simply the perfection of atone- 
ment. 

The word occurs but once in the English "Atone- 
version of the New Testament, in a passage ^^g^^gj^* 
where St. Paul declares that " we joy in God Testament. 
through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we 
have now received the atonement." ^ But the 
same Greek noun which is here rendered 
"atonement," occurs again in a later verse, 
where he speaks of "the reconciling of the 
world," 2 and in a still more important passage 
of another epistle, where he describes the gos- 
pel as " the word of the reconciliation," and the 
preacher's work as " the ministry of the recon- 
ciliation."^ The translation should be made 
uniform in all three places. Then we should 
have " the atonement of the world," " the word 
of the atonement," and "the ministry of the 
atonement." 

This would prepare us to appreciate the full The classic 
force of another passage in which we find, not P^^^^^^- 
the noun, but the verb from which it is de- 
rived, in an intensive form which gives it new 
value, and in a connection which seems to pour 
fresh light upon it from all sides of human 

1 Rom. V. 11. 2 Rom. xi. 15. 

8 2 Cor. V. 18, 19. 



140 



The Perfection of Atonement 



When that 
which is 
perfect is 
come. 



experience.^ The classic passage on the atone- 
ment is in the first chapter of the Epistle to the 
Colossians, and the central idea of it is in the 
twentieth verse, in which St. Paul declares 
that it pleased the Father, by Christ, " to atone 
all things with himself ; by him, I say, whether 
they be things in earth, or things in heaven." 
Go backward and forward from this point, and 
see how many meanings converge in St. Paul's 
idea of the great atonement. Deliverance from 
the power of darkness ; ^ redemption through 
Christ's blood, even the forgiveness of sins ; ^ 
a new birth from the dead ; * peace-making by 
the cross ; ^ the winning back of enemies ; ^ 
the taking away of blame and reproof ; ^ the 
interpretation of human sufferings in fellow- 
ship with the afflictions of Christ ; ^ and finally 
the making known of the riches of the glory 
of a mystery, " which is Christ in you, the hope 
of glory." ^ This, indeed, is atonement made 
perfect. 

The perfection of it lies in the fulness and 
clearness with which it embodies and expresses 
the three essential elements of all lesser atone- 



1 The noun is KardWayr] : the verb is KaTaWdaa-b} : the 
intensive form is ArroKaTaWdTTia. 

2 vs. 13. 3 V3. 14. 4 vs. 18. 5 VS. 20. 6 vs. 21. 

7 VS. 22. 8 vs. 24. 9 vs. 27. 



The Perfection of Atonement 141 

^' 
ments. Its purpose is a true, deep, eternal 
harmony of spirit between man and God, a 
peace which the world can neither give nor 
take away. Its condition of operative power 
is a full acknowledgment of the immense ob- 
stacle which sin has put between man and God. 
Its motive is pure and perfect love, — the love 
which meets all needs as man feels them in 
his repentant heart, — the love which passeth 
knowledge in its power to cover the whole 
mystery of sin as it is known to God alone. 



142 



The Perfection of Atonement 



The Love that meets All Needs 



Atonement 
begins with 
God's love. 



Atonement 
a form of 
Incarna- 
tion, 



There is no truly Christian view of the 
atonement which does not begin with the love 
of God.i This love involves the primal pur- 
pose of self-revelation, of union with man, of 
a divine incarnation. There is a gospel, a 
promise of God's communication of Himself to 
man, in the very act of creation. " The faith 
of the atonement presupposes the faith of the 
incarnation." 2 

If this be true, it follows that we may be- 
lieve that the Son of God would have come 
into the world whether man had sinned or not. 
God has chosen and loved mankind in His Son 
before the foundation of the world.^ There is 
a profound truth in the saying of Robertson of 
Brighton, " God's idea of humanity is, and ever 
was, humanity as it is in Jesus Christ."* 

Atonement, therefore, is the form which is 
given to the incarnation by the presence of sin 



1 Charles Cuthbert Hall, The Gospel of the Divine Sacri- 
Jice^ ch. i. 

2 Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement^ pp. xvi ff. 
8 Eph. i. 4. 

* Life and Letters of F. W. Bobertson, Vol. II., p. 121. 



The Perfection of Atonement 143 

in the world. Christ would have come to us 
as the revealer of the divine love, even though 
the world had never been separated from God.^ 
But because the separation had actually taken 
place, because man had offended against God, 
and departed from His ideal, and fallen into 
enmity with Him, Christ must reveal the 
divine love as a suffering love, a sacrificial 
love, a reconciling love, in order to bring man 
back to God. 

This atoning form of incarnation appears to The glory of 
us more glorious, more wonderful, than any ^"'^^J'^^"^- 
other form, because it costs more. It is love 
put to the test. It is love overcoming ob- 
stacles. It is love militant and victorious. 
And its perfection is manifest in the freedom 
and fulness with which it meets all the needs 
imposed by the fact of sin. 

Our consciousness of these needs is the The known 

measure of our power to understand the atone- ""^ ^^^ "^" 
^ known. 

ment. But beyond this consciousness there is 
another region wherein the results of evil, the 
disorders which it has introduced into the world, 
surpass our comprehension. In that region we 
cannot fully understand the atonement. We 

1 Westcott's Commentary on the Epistles of John, pp. 
273 ff. Oxenliain, The Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement, 
pp. 80 n. 



144 The Perfection of Atonement 

can only accept it, and rest upon it, as a great 
fact through which the concord of an untuned 
universe is restored, and infinite mercy is har- 
monized with infinite justice in the redemptive 
government of the world. 

In music there are notes too high and too 
low for us to hear. But the chord which fills 
the range of our hearing with harmony must be 
harmonious also in the unheard undertones and 
overtones. Our faith in the unmeasured values 
of the atonement in the spheres beyond our 
ken is inseparably connected with an experi- 
ence of its active power to meet our conscious 
wants as sinful men. 
The needs of What are these wants? They spring from 
the four elements which are present in the sense 
of sin, — the shame of impurity, the pain of 
bondage, the apprehension of guilt, and the 
hope of mercy. 1 To these four elements, and 
to the needs which arise out of them, there are 
four things in the atonement which correspond, 
— a power to cleanse the soul, a power to lib- 
erate the life, a power to satisfy the law, and a, 
power to reveal forgiveness. And these four 
things are spoken of in the New Testament 
under four principal expressions, — a sin-offer- 

1 Ch. ii., pp. 40 ff. 



sinners. 



The Perfection of Atonement 145 

ing ; 1 a ransom ; ^ a satisfaction, the payment 
of a debt ; ^ and a reconciliation.^ 

There is a famous passage in Coleridge's Metaphors 
Aids to Reflection^ in which he explains that ^/^^;«^^^^- 
these expressions are figures of speech, which 
do not describe the real nature of the atone- 
ment, but only illustrate "the nature and 
extent of the consequences and effects of the 
atonement, and excite in the receivers a due 
sense of the magnitude and manifold operation 
of the boon, and of the love and gratitude due 
to the Redeemer." 

I should accept the positive part of Cole- 
ridge's explanation, but I should reject the 
negative part of it. 

Undoubtedly these metaphors are intended Their 
to express the great benefits which sinners ^^^^^^y- 
receive from the atoning work of Christ. 
They describe the results which it produces 
in the consciousness of man, — a sense of 
cleansing from defilement, a sense of deliver- 
ance from slavery, a sense of being right with 
the law, and a sense of God's willingness to 

1 Heb. ix. 19-28 ; 1 John i. 7 ; Kev. i. 5. 

2 1 Tim. ii. 6 ; Gal. iv. 5 ; Eph. i. 7 ; Col. i. 14. 

3 Gal. V. 3 ; 2 Cor. v. 21 ; 1 Pet. iii. 18. 

4 Eph. ii. 14, 16 ; 2 Tim. ii. 5. 

s pp. 309 ff., American edition. 

L 



146 The Perfection of Atoneinent 

pardon. These are subjective effects. They 
are within us. But do they not belong to the 
real nature and intention of the atonement ? 
Are they not clear indications of its purpose 
and meaning ? Is not this complete reconcilia- 
tion with God, in spite of sin, precisely what it 
was intended to accomplish? Are not these 
consequences in man's spiritual consciousness 
just as real, just as veritable, as any other con- 
sequences that we can imagine ? 
The The atonement, as has been said, "is the 

^oint^^' meeting-point of the objective and subjective 
elements of Christianity." ^ It covers all the 
ground that lies between God and man, so far 
as sin has touched it. It has a reference to 
every element of the divine nature which con- 
demns sin, and to every element of human 
nature which is affected by sin. It acts directly 
upon the divine will and upon the human will.^ 
There is no possible metaphor, drawn from any 
real relation of man to God, which is without 
its value in illustrating the real nature of the 
atonement. 

So far, then, from denying the verity of 
these four figures of speech, we should accept 

1 Oxenham, Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement^ p. xl. 

2 Kitschl, History of the Christian Doctrine of Justifica- 
tion and Beconciliation, p. 9. 



used by 
Christ. 



The Perfection of Atonement 147 

them as expressions of substantial truth. We 
should seek to make them as real and living as 
possible in our own experience. And we should 
go back to the New Testament to see if there 
are not other metaphors of the atonement 
which fit in with our consciousness of need as 
sinners. 
yl There are four other figures of speech, less The figures 
familiar, and less frequently used, which throw 
new light upon the subject. They are used by 
Christ Himself to describe the effects of His 
sacrifice. It would be well if they were taken 
more deeply into our conception of the atone- 
ment. 

The first figure is the metaphor of germina- Germina- 
tion. "Except a corn of wheat fall into the 
ground and die, it abideth alone : but if it die, 
it bringeth forth much fruit." ^ This means 
that Christ's death is the means of communi- 
cating new life — pure, holy, immortal — to the 
souls of men. It answers to the need which 
springs out of the shame of sin as the conscious 
deadening of the higher life. 

The second figure is the metaphor of vicari- The Shep 
ous suffering. " I am the good shepherd : the 
good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep." ^ sheep. 
This means that because Christ loves us, and 
1 John xii. 24. 2 John x. 11. 



Hon. 



herd dying 
for the 



Consecra- 
tion. 



The new 
covenant. 



148 The Perfection of Atonement 

has identified Himself with us, He is willing to 
die for us in order to rescue us from sin, the rob- 
ber of our souls. It is another aspect of redemp- 
tion, the ransom of a life willingly laid down for 
others in the conflict with evil. It answers to 
the painful sense of helplessness in our strug- 
gles to escape from sin. It is the voice of the 
victor who stands by the vanquished and prom- 
ises deliverance. 

The third figure is the metaphor of consecra- 
tion. " For their sakes I sanctify myself, that 
they also might be sanctified through the 
truth." 1 This means that Christ's death is 
the completion of His holy obedience to God. 
It is more than the payment of a debt exacted 
by the law. It is the fulfilment of a service 
prompted by love. " Lo, I come to do thy will, 
O God." 2 And so it becomes in us the spirit 
of a new obedience. 

The fourth figure is the metaphor of a new 
covenant of pardon. " This is my blood of the 
new covenant, which is shed for many for the 
remission of sins."^ This means that Christ's 
death is the seal of God's entering into a new 
engagement with us, not of works, but of 
grace, in which He will deal with us as a 



1 John xvii. 19. 2 Heb. x. 9. 

3 Matt. xxvi. 28. 



The Perfection of Atonement 149 

father, forgiving our sins for His name's sake. 
An ancient covenant was always sealed with 
blood. But it was not made on account of the 
blood. That was simply the sign of the solem- 
nity and binding force of the engagement. The 
covenant itself rested upon the willingness of 
both parties to enter into it and to keep it. 
Christ's death does not make God willing to 
forgive. It reveals His forgiveness as ready 
and waiting for us to claim it. 

Now take these four latter metaphors of the A com- 
effects of the atonement in its relation to us, ^^^**^^- 
and lay them beside the four others which are 
more familiarly employed. See how they mu- 
tually illuminate one another, and how the 
light which comes from each reminds us that 
no one of them can be interpreted alone as 
the secret of "the true doctrine of atonement." 

There is a sacrificial element in it, assuredly. The 
It is an offering for sin. But it is not in ««^*>^'«^ 

^ element. 

any sense an offering which is separate from 
us. It is implanted in us, in our human nature, 
as a seed is planted in the earth, to germinate 
and bear fruit. 

There was a substitution on Calvary. But 
it was not the substitution of a sinless Christ 
for a sinful race. It was the substitution of 



150 The Perfection of Atonement 

humanity jplus Christ, for humanity minus 
Christ. He bore our sins, not apart from us, 
but with us. He expressed, in His willing sub- 
mission to the death of the cross, the ideal and 
representative repentance of mankind for sin.^ 
And this sacrifice is the sufficient atonement 
for the original sin of the whole race. He is 
joined by His cross to every sinful soul that 
repents of actual sin, and thus there is no 
further need of sacrifice, since the offering of 
Christ abides forever and germinates in each 
heart that believes in Him. To be crucified 
with Christ is to feel the guilt of sin in like 
manner (though never in like degree) as He 
felt it. It is to acknowledge the righteousness 
of the law which condemns sin, even as He 
acknowledged it by suffering with the race 
which lay under condemnation. It is to pre- 
sent to God, by faith, our lesser sacrifices of a 
broken and a contrite spirit, not now standing 
alone in their imperfection, but purified and 
made precious by union with that perfect 
sacrifice in which Jesus Christ poured out His 
soul unto death. 

The There is also a redemptive element in the 

^itment^^ atonement, undoubtedly. It is a ransom which 

1 Campliell, The Nature of the Atonement^ pp. 247 ff. 



The Perfection of Atonement 151 

emancipates us from the tyranny of evil. But 
it is not, as the patristic writers imagined, a 
ransom paid to the devil. There is no trace 
of such an idea in the New Testament. It is, 
as Christ Himself teaches us, a victory over the 
evil one. It is our ransom, just as the death of a 
heroic leader who conquers in a good cause and 
in conquering dies, is the ransom of his people 
from defeat and slavery. The liberating power 
of Christ's death for us is never to be separated 
from His spiritual victory over evil, nor from 
the courage which it inspires in our hearts to 
know that we have such a mighty, faithful, 
triumphant Shepherd. 

There is also an element of satisfaction to Thesatis- 
the righteous law in the atonement, undoubt- ■^*^^*^^- 
edly. Christ fulfilled all that the law of God 
required. He paid the debt of righteousness 
to the full. But the emphasis in this satisfac- 
tion is not to be laid exclusively, nor chiefly, 
upon His sufferings, but upon His holiness, 
upon His willing and complete obedience to 
the Father in all things. As St. Bernard said, 
lifon mors, sed voluntas plaeuit sponte morientis. 

The value and meaning of Christ's atone- 
ment as a satisfaction depends upon the con- 
nection of His sufferings and death with His 



152 The Perfection of Atonement 

perfect life. It was "the mind that was in 
Christ Jesus " that made Him " obedient unto 
death, even the death of the cross." ^ That 
mind of obedience was the priceless jewel 
worth more than enough to pay the whole 
debt of righteousness. 
If ChHst The truth of this view is self-evident. How 

had died in ^^^^ ^^ think of it in any other way ? Suppose 
childhood? ^ *; ^^ 

for a moment that Christ had died in infancy. 

Suppose that instead of escaping into Egypt 

with the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph, the babe 

Jesus had been slain with the other children of 

Bethlehem. His death would still have been 

the sacrifice of an innocent victim. It would 

still have shown the hatefulness and cruelty of 

human sin. It might still be regarded, in 

imagination, as the substitution of the guiltless 

- for the guilty. It might still be defined, by 

a legal fiction, as the transference of a penalty 

to one who had not transgressed. It might 

still be presented, by a purely forensic theory, as 

an exhibition of a supposed vindictive element 

in the law, which could only be satisfied by 

the shedding of innocent blood. All this might 

still be attributed to the death of Christ if it 

had befallen Him in helpless infancy. But 

would it then have been, in any satisfactory 

1 Phil. ii. 5-8. 



The Perfection of Atonement 153 

sense, an atoning sacrifice ? Would it have had 
any power to really reconcile our hearts with 
the law which requires righteousness ? 

No, a thousand times no ! That which gives The value of 
the obedience of the cross its reconciling power ^ ^ ^^^^^' 
is the fact that it was voluntary suffering, 
holy suffering, suffering which made Christ 
perfect,^ the crown and consummation of His 
patient, faithful, self-denying, stainless life. 

It is only when we look at it in this way that 
the holiness of Christ becomes, not the substi- 
tute for our holiness (which would contradict 
the spirit of the law), but the source of our 
holiness,^ — the consecration of our Kinsman 
High-Priest, in which and by which the conse- 
cration of His brethren is secured. ^ " Christ is 
the end of the law for righteousness to every 
one that believeth."* Thus, and thus only, 
the law is satisfied in Him. 

Once more, there is a reconciling element in The recon- 
the atonement, undoubtedly. It does remove ^*^*"**^^- 
a real obstacle between man and God. It does 
bring God nearer to man, in order that man 
may come close to God. But this obstacle is 

1 Heb. ii. 10. 

2 W. E. Gladstone, Later Gleanings, p. 336. 
8 Heb. ii. 11-18. ^ Rom. x. 4. 



154 The Perfection of Atonement 

never to be thought of as an unwillingness on 
God's part to pardon and restore the guilty. 
This reconciliation is always to be interpreted 
in the light of Christ's word of "the new cove- 
nant," freely and gladly made by the divine 
mercy, and sealed with the most holy seal in the 
universe, — "the precious blood of Christ, as 
of a lamb without blemish and without spot." ^ 
Grace is the The atonement, then, is never to be regarded 
^atonement. ^^ ^^® cause of God's grace. It is the result 
and the seal of His grace. It is the channel 
made by grace, through which all the blessed 
effects of the divine love may flow, across the 
bitter waste that sin has made, to all who 
\ hunger and thirst after righteousness, in order 
that they may be filled. 

What has it If any one should ask, therefore, " What has 
^luY^^ the atonement done for you?" our answer 
should be broad enough to cover all our needs. 
With Christ God has freely given us all things : 
an assurance of mercy, divinely sealed ; a satis- 
faction of the law, divinely perfected ; a ransom 
from evil, divinely accomplished ; a sacrifice 
for sin, divinely offered ; a covenant of peace ; 
a spirit of consecration ; a good Shepherd of 
our souls ; a seed of everlasting life, — and if 
1 1 Pet. i. 19. 



The Perfection of Atonement 155 

there be any other thing that sinners need for 
their salvation, doubtless this also is waiting 
to be discovered in the atonement. 

The only false view is that which questions 
the reality of any of these blessings. The only 
dangerous view is that which interprets any 
one of them in such a way as to make it merely 
formal and artificial, and to deny the necessity 
of the others. All views are true which recog- 
nize, through experience, the love of God in 
Christ meeting any of our needs as sinful men, 
and which preserve a grateful openness of heart 
to welcome every new ray of light that comes 
from the cross through the experience of other 
men. 

After all is said, out of the fulness of each Theun- 

ransomed heart, there still remains a secret ^^^«^«^^^ 

gift. 

reason for gratitude, unuttered because not yet 
perfectly realized. "Thanks be unto God for 
his unspeakable gift."i 

1 2 Cor. ix. 15. 



156 The Ferfection of Atonement 

II 

The Love that passeth Knowledge 

The twofold If there is a mystery in sin, there must also 
mystery. ^^ ^ mystery in the atonement.^ 

We can know the love of God in Christ 
which meets all our conscious needs as sinners. 
But that love, as it makes provision for all the 
unsearchable necessities of God's moral govern- 
ment of the universe, must be a love that pass- 
eth knowledge. 

There are some theologians who object stren- 
uously to this acknowledgment of a mystery in 
the atonement. It seems to them that it leaves 
" in the very focus of revelation a spot of pure 
impenetrable black. "^ I would rather say that 
it leaves a centre of " light inaccessible and full 
of glory." 

The humility of partial knowledge is not the 
same as the despair of total ignorance. " We 
know in part, and we prophesy in part." ^ This 
was the last text from which President James 
McCosh spoke in the chapel of Princeton Uni- 
versity. " We know in part," said he ; " lut we 

know ! " 

1 Ch. ii., p. 26. 

2 James Denney, Studies in Theology, p. 106. 
8 1 Cor. xiii. 9. 



The Perfection of Atonement 157 

We know sin, for example, in its qualities Sin only 
and results, since they are manifested in human f *^^^^^ 

•^ known. 

life and in our own souls. But we do not per- 
fectly know it ; for its origin, and the secret 
forces which keep it alive and operative, though 
it be in itself a kind of death, and the strange 
subterranean relations which give it a unity 
amid all its diversity, and the mysterious power 
by which it destroys freedom of will while 
seeming to express it, — these things are hid- 
den from us. They are inscrutable. Sin is a 
bottomless gulf. To account for it rationally 
would be to justify its existence. "Sin ex- 
plained," said Dr. Edward G. Robinson, "would 
be sin defended." It is in fact a kind of re- 
versed miracle. It is the action of the creature 
without the creator. It takes place in a sphere 
below the reach of our thought. It transcends 
reason, — downward. 

It is fitting, therefore, it is altogether tOv.be Atonement 
expected, that the atonement which is to ^^^^^^^'c^^^^- 
take away sin should also transcend reason, — 
but upward. It ought to be, as it is, an inex- 
plicable and unsearchable mystery of redeeming 
love, just as sin is an inexplicable and unsearch- 
able mystery of enslaving hate. It ought to 
cover, as it does, all those secret relations in 
which the unity of righteousness consists, just 



158 The Perfection of Atonement 

as sin entangles tlie soul in that network of 
subtle bondage wherein the unity of evil con- 
sists. The atonement, in its divine essence, 
must go as far above our knowledge, as sin, in 
its mortal perversity, goes below it. 

Mercy and Consider the subject from another point of 
justice. yiew. The atonement is undoubtedly the mani- 
festation of God's mercy in harmony with His 
justice. But what is mercy, and what is jus- 
tice, in our knowledge of them, but fragments 
of a great circle which sweeps far beyond our 
vision. So far as logic goes, the forgiveness of 
sins appears like an absolutely impossible thing. 
An offence once committed must stand on the 
books forever as a thing to be condemned and 
punished. So far as logic goes, the execution 
of absolute justice seems to be equally impossi- 
ble. We have never seen it. We cannot con- 
ceive nor explain it. " Justice is a fragment, 
mercy is a fragment, mediation is a fragment ; 
justice, mercy, mediation as a reason of mercy 
— all three ; what indeed are they but great 
vistas and openings into an invisible world in 
which is the point of view which brings them 
all together."! 

And yet in this mysterious region into which 

1 Mozley's University Sermons, p. 177. 



The Perfection of Atonement 159 

the divine side of the atonement reaches, there Two points 
are two things which we ought to believe, even "^^ ^^^"^* 
though we cannot fully comprehend them. 

First, it is necessary to the reality of faith to 
believe that the atonement has a practical rela- 
tion to God, an actual and direct effect upon the 
divine will as well as upon our will. " Christ's 
work can be regarded as efficacious in the justifi- 
cation and reconciliation of men only in so far 
as we, at the same time, recognize a reference 
of that work to God. Nay, rather. His saving 
operations upon men cannot be understood 
except it be presupposed that His doing and 
suffering for that end had also a value for God, 
whether that be expressed in the motives of 
satisfaction, merit, propitiation, or somehow 
otherwise." ^ 

Second, it is essential to the moral integrity 
of faith that we should believe that the divine 
justice and mercy, which are harmonized in the 
atonement, are not different in kind, but only 
in degree, from mercy and justice as they are 
revealed in our fragmentary knowledge. There 
can be no satisfaction of divine justice which 
does not justify itself in the moral sense. There 
can be no propitiation of mercy which introduces 

1 Kitschl, History of the Christian Doctrine of Justifica- 
tion^ etc., p. 9. 



160 



The Perfection of Atonement 



Immoral 
analogies 
shut out. 



False 
phrases of 

theology. 



a conflict, or an appearance of conflict, among 
the attributes of God. Mercy must be merci- 
ful; and justice, just. 

This shuts out at once the possibility of inter- 
preting the mystery of atonement by analogy 
with ideas and figures drawn from imperfect 
and cruel systems of human government, or 
from corrupt and superstitious systems of re- 
ligion. The notion of a God whose vindictive 
anger demands a precise equivalent of suffering 
as the condition of release from penalty does 
not belong to Christianity. It belongs to the 
moral ill-temper of a civilization which, like 
that of the middle ages or of the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries, was essentially harsh 
and cruel. It belongs to a conception of life in 
which law was relentless and vindictive, — in 
which men were hung for petty larceny and 
burned alive for heresy ; in which war was 
simply a colossal public revenge, and a cap- 
tured city was certain to be sacked. It belongs, 
in its religious kinship, to paganism, to fetich- 
ism, to the cruel, sensual religions of Mexico 
and Africa. 

Shadows of their darkness have fallen upon 
the outer form of Christianity. Strange and 
uncouth words have found their way into 
the dogmatic books which vainly seek to reduce 



The Perfection of Atonement 161 

life to logic. Wild and wandering phrases of 
bewildered theologians have represented Christ 
as exposed to the divine wrath in our place, or 
as "wiping away the red anger-spot from the 
brow of God." Dismal echoes from the chants 
of blood-stained heathen temples have crept 
into the hymns of the church, — echoes which 
say that 

" On Christ Almighty vengeance fell 
Which must have sunk a world to hell," 

or that 

" One rosy drop from Jesus' heart 
Was worlds of seas to quench God's ire." 

These echoes, these phrases, these words, have 
undoubtedly penetrated, in a wavering and un- 
certain way, into the ritual, the dogma, the 
outer circle, of Christianity. It seems as if, to 
use the expression of that great German the- 
ologian, Rothe, "in His work for man it were 
the constant fate of God to be misunderstood." 
But these misunderstandings cannot enter, and 
they have not entered, into the inner life where 
Christ is truly manifested as the living sacrifice 
and Saviour. 

There is not a word in all the New Testament Christ was 
which implies that Christ offered a sacrifice to 
the anger of God. It is morally inconceivable 



never under 
God's wrath. 



162 The Perfection of Atonement 

that the Redeemer coming from the bosom of 
the Father to do His work should ever have 
been, in any sense, an object of the divine wrath. 
For that wrath, as we have already seen, is not 
a vindictive anger against sinners ; it is a pure 
and holy indignation against sin. How, then, 
could it have rested for a single moment upon 
Christ ? 

Nor is there anything in the Bible to imply 
that Christ has taken that wrath against sin 
away. It still exists. It still hates and con- 
demns sin as much as ever. 

Christ delivers us from the fear of it, not by 
subjecting Himself to it, but by separating us 
from the sin against which it is directed. 

How, then, shall we interpret Christ's suffer- 
ings? 
How did There was no infliction of punishment upon 

Christ ^YiQ innocent instead of the guilty. There was 

no transference of the demerits of the sinful to 
the sinless. Christ remained guiltless ; man 
remained guilty. But Christ entered into hu- 
manity, freely, willingly, taking on Himself all 
its limitations, burdens, pains, and sorrows. 
Christ lived and died with man and for man. 
He was not merely a substitute : He was a 
representative. He was not thrust into our 
place : He shared our lot ; and if that sharing 



The Perfection of Atonement 163 

involved a sacrificial death upon the cross, if 
there was no other way in which He could be 
one with sinners, and make them one with 
Himself, and lift them out of guilt and doom, 
save by dying for their sins, what then ? 

Does the recognition of this, as a mysterious 
fact revealed in the crucifixion, cast any stain 
upon the justice of God? Not so thought 
Christ, who shrank from the cross, yet said, 
"Father, not my will, but thine be done." 
Not so thought the Apostles, who saw in Christ 
crucified the perfect revelation of the righteous- 
ness and love of God. Not so thought such 
a Christian as Phillips Brooks. The inner life 
of Christendom finds a true expression in his 
sermon on TJie Conqueror from Edom. 

" My friends," he says, " far be it from me 
to read all the deep mystery that is in this 
picture. Only this I know is the burden and 
soul of it all, this truth, that sin is a horrible, 
strong, positive thing, and that not even Divin- 
ity grapples with him and subdues him except 
in strife and pain. What pain may mean to the 
Infinite and Divine, what difficulty may mean 
to Omnipotence, I cannot tell. Only I know 
that all that they could mean, they mean here. 
This symbol of the blood bears this great truth, 
which has been the power of salvation to mill- 



164 The Perfection of Atonement 

ions of hearts, and which must make this con- 
queror the Saviour of your hearts, too, the truth 
that only in self-sacrifice and suffering could 
even God conquer sin. Sin is never so dread- 
ful as when we see the Saviour with that blood 
upon His garments. And the Saviour Himself 
is never so dear, never wins so utter and so 
tender a love, as when we see what it has cost 
Him to save us. Out of that love, born of His 
holy suffering, comes the new impulse after a 
holy life ; and so, when we stand at last purified 
by the power of grateful obedience, binding our 
holiness and escape from our sin close to our 
Lord's struggle with sin for us, it shall be said 
of us that we have ' washed our robes and made 
them white in the blood of the Lamb.' " ^ 
Divine That the divine mercy is satisfied in this 

conception of the atonement, no one can doubt. 
But how is the satisfaction of the divine justice 
manifested in this view ? What glimpse does 
it give us of a holy law vindicated, an eternal 
righteousness maintained ? 

It seems to me that it certainly shows us one 
thing, however much it leaves still hidden from 
our knowledge in the unsearchable counsels of 
God. It shows us that God so honours and 
upholds the moral law by which He governs 
1 Phillips Brooks, Sermons, Vol. I., p. 53. 



justice 
satisfied. 



The Perfection of Atonement 165 

the world, that not even Christ could come into 
union with humanity, not even Christ could 
become man, without sharing the consequences 
of man's sin. Christ was not punished for sins 
that He had never done. Christ was not pun- 
ished for our sins. Christ was not punished 
at all. But because our sins deserve punish- 
ment, Christ, having become one with us, 
endured the shame and the cross, poured 
out His soul unto death and was numbered 
with the transgressors, suffered and died as the 
human life of God, because suffering and 
death have justly come upon, the world of sin. 

This is indeed the noblest vindication of the 
law that we can possibly conceive. It elevates 
and illuminates the atonement, so that it shines 
far above us, as a supreme mountain-peak of 
self-consistent righteousness. It makes it a 
part of an eternal moral order, resting upon 
the very nature of God, and His relation to the 
world as its moral governor. It is a doctrine of 
majesty and power. 

Forgiveness without atonement, if we could Forgiveness 
conceive of such a thing, would leave us far ^^^^ 

° atonement. 

more in the dark, would present a far greater 
mystery. But forgiveness with atonement as- 
sures us that God is in eternal harmony with 
His own law. He has not permitted suffering 



166 The Perfection of Atonement 

and death to come into the world merely to 
execute a personal vengeance on sin as an in- 
sult offered to His majesty. They are the 
expression of an eternal and righteous mode of 
government. Their presence is necessary, and 
just, and consistent with God's goodness and 
love as well as with His wisdom and holiness. 
The Son of God, entering the world to redeem 
it, not from without but from within, must 
submit to these conditions. 

He could not be punished. That was impos- 
sible. But He could suffer and die. And so 
He did, confessing and glorifying the integrity 
and solidarity of God's attributes in the moral 
law of the universe. ^ 
A mystery Wherein that solidarity consists, what is the 
0/ g ory. eternal fitness and propriety of atonement by 
sacrifice and suffering, we can neither fully 
understand nor perfectly explain. " The nature 
of the redemptive act in itself is not to be com- 
passed nor uttered by the language of human 
understanding." ^ When we look upon it " we 
are in the presence of forces which issue from 
infinity, and pass out of our sight even while 
we are contemplating their effects."^ 

1 Rom. iii. 25. 

2 Shairp, Studies in Poetry and Philosophy, p. 197. 

3 Lux Mundi, pp. 285, 310. 



The Perfection of Atonement 167 

This confession of something beyond our 
comprehension in the atonement runs through 
all the literature of the Christian religion. 
Some of the theologians, indeed, scoff at it and 
reject it. But the heart of the church has 
always felt it profoundly, and acknowledged it 
with adoration. On Calvary we behold the 
"love of Christ which passeth knowledge." ^ 

If the meaning of the cross were perfectly 
plain to us it would be less precious. We know 
that we need more than we can know. The 
cross is most dear to our hearts because it is the 
sign of an unsearchable mystery of saving love. 

1 Eph. iii. 19. 



VI 

THE MESSAGE OF THE CROSS 



Weepers, come to this God, for He doth weep ; 

Ye sufferers, come to Him, for He doth care ; 
Ye tremblers, come, for He doth mercy keep ; 

Come, ye who die, for He doth still endure. 

— Victor Hugo, 
j^crit au Bas d'un Crucifix, 1842. 

The cross is the guarantee of the gospel : therefore it 
has been its standard, 

— Henri Frederic Amiel, 

Journal Intimef April 15, 1870. 



VI 

THE MESSAGE OF THE CROSS 

I 
The cross speaks silently but surely of God's Love' 



s con- 



ffreat love for sinners. For this reason it has ^'^^^^'^9 

° word. 

become the sign under which Christianity has 
won its way in a world of sin. This is not a 
theory of theology. It is a fact of history. 
Wherever the religion of Christ has advanced, 
its song of victory has been the burden of the 
ancient Latin hymn: 

" Forward the royal banners fly, 
The sacred cross shines out on high, 
Where man's Creator stooped to die 
In human flesh, to draw man nigh." ^ 

The same burden is repeated in the latest music 
of the modern church: 

" Onward, Christian soldiers, 
Marching as to war, 
With the cross of Jesus 
Going on before." 2 

1 Venantius Fortunatus, Vexilla Begis prodeunt, sixth 
century. 2 Sabine Baring-Gould, 1865. 

171 



172 The Message of the Gross 

The strange Nothing could appear more strange, if we 
leave out of view that interpretation of the 
death of Jesus which comes from the faith of 
the atonement, than that the cross, the emblem 
of the world's shame and reproach, should 
become the symbol of Christian faith, the 
treasure of Christian hope, the banner of 
Christian victory. How came it to be thus 
transformed ? What miracle has exalted the 
instrument of death to the place of glory ? 

When Christianity came to China under this 
banner, the Chinese wondered at it, mocked at 
it, issued an edict against it. This edict said: 
" Why should the worshippers of Jesus rever- 
ence the instrument of His punishment, and 
consider it so to represent Him as not to ven- 
ture to tread upon it? Would it be common 
sense, if the father or ancestor of a house had 
been killed by a shot from a gun, or by a 
wound from a sword, that his sons or grand- 
sons should reverence the gun or the sword as 
their father or ancestor?" It is a searching 
question; and the only answer to it is in the 
inner life, where the cross of Jesus has been 
planted as the tree of peace and blessing, the 
sign of divine forgiveness and redeeming love; 
so that the first cry of faith is 

" Simply to Thy cross I cling," 



The Message of the Cross 173 

and the last breath of prayer is 

" Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes.'* 

There is a passage in the Confessions of a The cross 
Beautiful Soul which tells the story of human ^^^ets faith. 
experience before the cross. 

" ' Now, Almighty God, grant me the gift of 
faith ! ' This was the prayer that came out of 
the deepest need of my heart. I leaned upon 
the little table beside me, and hid my tear- 
stained face in my hands. At last I was in the 
state in which we must be, if God is to hear our 
prayers, but in which we so seldom are. 

" Yes, but who could ever express, even in the 
dimmest way, the experience that came to me 
then? A secret influence drew my soul away 
to the cross, where Jesus once expired. It was 
an inward leading, I cannot give it any other 
name, like that which draws the heart to its 
beloved one in absence, a spiritual approach 
doubtless far truer and more real than a dream. 
So my soul drew near to Him who became man 
and died upon the cross, and in that moment I 
knew what faith was. 

" 'This is faith! ' I cried, and sprang up as if 
half frightened. I tried to make sure of my 
experience, to verify my vision, and soon I was 
convinced that my spirit had received a wholly 
new power to uplift itself. 



174 The Message of the Cross 

" In these feelings words forsake us. I could 
distinguish clearly between my experience and 
all fantasy. It was entirely free from fan- 
tasy. It was not a dream-picture. And yet 
it gave me the sense of reality in the object 
which it brought before me, just as imagina- 
tion does when it recalls the features of a dear 
friend far away."^ 

Many are the souls that have passed through 
that indescribable experience. Millions of men 
who have been unmoved by philosophy and un- 
convinced by argument, have yielded to the 
mystic attractions of the cross of Jesus. The 
story of this divine charm runs like a thread of 
gold through all the many coloured literature 
of Christianity. 
The cross in If I were askcd to name the three books out- 
Christian ^-^^ ^£ ^-^^ ^^^^ Testament which lie closest to 

literature. 

the Christian heart, and are entitled to be called 
the classics of Christian faith, I should choose 
The Imitation of Christ and The Pilgrim's Prog- 
ress and The Christian Year. There is no dif- 
ference among them in their testimony to the 
power of the cross of Jesus to draw men to 
Him. 

" Take up, therefore, thy cross," says Thomas 
a Kempis, " and follow Jesus, and thou shalt go 
1 Wilhelm Meister''s Lehrjahre, Vol. II., p. 114. 



The Message of the Cross 175 

into life everlasting. He went before bearing 
His cross, and died for thee on the cross, that 
thou mightest also bear thy cross and die on 
the cross with Him." 

" So I saw in my dream," says John Bunyan, 
" that just as Christian came up with the Cross, 
his burden loosed from off his shoulders and fell 
from off his back, and began to tumble, and so 
continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the 
sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more. 
Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and 
said with a merry heart. He hath given me rest 
by His sorrow, and life by His death." 

"Is it not strange," says John Keble in his 
poem on the Crucifixion, — 

" Is it not strange, the darkest hour 
That ever dawned on sinful earth, 
Should touch the heart with softer power 

For comfort than an angel's mirth ? 
That to the cross the mourner's eye should turn, 
Sooner than where the stars of Christmas burn ? 



Lord of my heart, by Thy last cry, 
Let not Thy blood on earth be spent : 

Lo, at Thy feet I fainting lie. 
Mine eyes upon Thy wounds are bent ; 

Upon Thy streaming wounds my weary eyes 

Wait, like the parched earth on April skies. 



176 The Message of the Gross 

" Wash me, and dry these bitter tears ; 
Oh, let my heart no farther roam, — 
'Tis Thine by vows and hopes and fears, 

Long since. Oh, call Thy wanderer home, — 
To that dear home, safe in Thy wounded side. 
Where only broken hearts their sin and shame may 
hide." 



The Message of the Cross 177 



n 

Doubtless the attractive, healing, convincing, The blessing 
purifying, pacifying power of the cross comes ^ ^^^**' 

from its silent proclamation of the holy and 
self-sacrificing love of God. It reveals Him 
to us as He really is, — eternally willing to 
forgive sin, and entirely ready to suffer for 
the sake of making its forgiveness perfect and 
pure and altogether beyond question. It car- 
ries in itself the marks of an immeasurable 
mercy ; a tender resolution to meet, for our 
sake, requirements that are beyond our ken ; 
a tranquil and complete assurance that God's 
pardon is a holy pardon, a righteous pardon, a 
pardon through which " there is no condemna- 
tion to those who are in Christ Jesus." ^ 

But we do not say that this message of the it comes to 

. , -1 1 • • i. (• 111* some who do 

cross IS the only ministry oi peace and blessing ^^^ U7ider- 
and enrichment that Christ has brought to the stand it. 
life of man. Nor do we say that those who 
have failed to hear in this message the very 
same words which it brings to us, or to inter- 
pret these words as they have been interpreted 
in our experience, have not been blessed in 
any way by Christ. 

Some have followed Him, as Peter did at 
1 Rom. viii. 1. 



178 The Message of the Cross 

first, unwilling to think of His cross. Some 
have trusted His forgiving power, as Mary 
Magdalen did, without apprehending what His 
forgiveness would cost. Some have called 
upon Him for salvation, as the penitent thief 
did, without understanding the great signifi- 
cance of His sacrifice. And there are some 
to-day who belong to Christ in their hearts 
and lives, but who have not yet read clearly 
the writing above the cross. 
They are Pure and patient souls, companions of the 

^Christ ^ merciful labours of Jesus, lovers of His gra- 
cious doctrine, worshippers of His divine per- 
fection, illustrators of His meek and lowly 
spirit, whose lives are fragrant with the sweet- 
ness of the Master's name, of whose presence 
the world is glad, in whose lowly service the 
heart of the Lord rejoiceth, — surely of them 
we may say. If any man have the spirit of Christy 
he is one of His. 

The saving shadow of the cross falls upon 
these gentle lives, though they know it not. 
Unconsciously they are sheltered beside the 
rock that is higher than they. Christ did not 
die only for those who call Him "Lord." He 
died also for those who minister to Him with- 
out knowing it. 

But the message which is proclaimed to the 



The Message of the Cross 179 

world by these serene and untroubled lives, — But the 
it is certainly a gospel ; but is it, indeed, the ^^^^^ ^^ *^^ 
Gospel for which the great mass of men, sinful, deeper 
struggling, weary, despondent, are longing? gospel 
No ; it is imperfect. It does not go down to 
the bottom of human experience. It does not 
meet the full need of those who labour and are 
heavy-laden under the weight of sin, of those 
who are tormented with remorse, of those who 
would give all that they have if they could blot 
out the fatal past and cast away the burden of 
their conscious guilt. Poor strugglers under 
the curse of evil, the vast majority of mankind 
long passionately for the blessedness of the man 
whose sins are forgiven, whose transgressions 
are covered. To such men the gospel of the 
Son of God, who bore our sins in His own 
body on the tree, is the real gospel, the veri- 
table "glad tidings of great joy." 

Christianity will cease to be the religion of 
the unshepherded multitude when it ceases to 
proclaim "redemption through Christ's blood, 
even the forgiveness of sins." Its true trans- 
mitters ever have been, and ever must be, those 
who consciously accept, believe, and trust the 
message of the cross. 



180 



The Message of the Cross 



III 



The growing 
message of 
the cross. 



St. Paul's 
experience. 



There is no final formula of the cross. Per- 
haps if it could have been put into a series of 
logical propositions, the divine sacrifice would 
not have been necessary. But God has seen fit 
to save men, not by a system of dialectics, but 
by an experience of grace. 

This experience takes into itself all the per- 
manent elements of the soul's life. It includes 
and interprets also all those elements which are 
progressive, the factors of man's moral being 
which are in process of development through 
the discipline of the individual .and the race. 

It has been well said that " one of the objects 
of the atonement is to form the conscience to 
which it makes its appeal." ^ 

It would be strange, indeed, if, with the 
education of man's ethical nature, there were 
not also a real progress in the interpretation of 
the message of the cross. It does not change ; 
it unfolds. It is not transmuted ; it is trans- 
lated. 

We can see how it grew in the epistles of St. 
Paul. It was the same gospel from the begin- 
ning to the end of his life. But it found new 

1 Alexander Mackennal, The Atonement : a Symposium, 
London, 1883, p. 19. 



The Message of the Cross 181 

expressions and took larger forms. It meant 
one thing in Thessalonica, and more of the same 
thing in Galatia, and more of the same thing in 
Corinth, and more of the same thing in Rome, 
until, finally, it rose to its height in the epistles 
of the imprisonment, where it appears as the 
good news of the reconciliation of all things, 
" whether they be things in earth or things in 
heaven." 1 

There are three great ideas in which the Three pro- 
human race has made an immense ethical f^^^^*^^ 
advance. And it seems to me that all of these 
advancing ideas must have an influence upon 
our interpretation of the message of the cross, 
and must open new vistas of wondrous glory in 
the circle of its universal significance. 

The first of these ideas is the unity and Human 
solidarity of mankind. It is characteristic of ^''^^^'^^<'^^' 
modern thought that, in its view, 

"The individual withers, and the world is more and 
more." 2 

Vast sociological tables are compiled, covering 
the physical peculiarities and social customs, 
the arts and industries, the family ties and 
ethical conceptions, the forms of government 

1 Col. i. 20. 2 Tennyson, Locksley Hall. 



182 The Message of the Cross 

and modes of worship of all sorts and condi- 
tions of men, in all quarters of the globe. The 
causes of the rise or decline of certain tribes are 
investigated ; the secret bonds which unite the 
generations on an upward or downward scale 
are traced ; the average intelligence of com- 
munities is measured ; the average welfare of 
the world is estimated ; the collective view of 
mankind predominates in the thoughtful mind 
of to-day. A stone is thrown into the water in 
America. Its ripples are followed and noted 
on the farthest shores of the islands of the sea. 
Men are many ; but humanity is one. 

It would be singular and unfortunate if this 

new view of life did not bring new and larger 

meanings into the message of the cross. It must 

be the meeting-point of races, as well as the 

landmark of centuries. It must reconcile man 

with men, as well as men with God. It must 

be an opener of closed doors, a conciliator of 

estranged peoples. 

The charter The universal charter of the cross, — " Go ye 

of the cross, therefore and disciple all nations," i — forgotten 

and obscured in ages of particularism, revives 

in ages of human brotherhood. A gospel of 

limited atonement becomes a manifest absurdity 

of selfishness. Sacrifice for others — one man 

1 Matt, xxviii. 19. 



The Message of the Cross 183 

for another, one race for another, and Christ 
for all — is seen to be built into the very 
structure of Christianity. 

If the modern world is to hear the message 
of the cross, it must speak the language of to-day 
— the language of universal atonement and 
foreign missions. 

Another idea in which there has been a great The purpose 
advance is the notion of law. In the first ^■^^^^• 
stage of human progress, the concept of law 
is chiefly vindictive ; it simply destroys the 
offender. In the next stage, it takes on a 
nobler aspect and becomes a system which in- 
flicts retribution on the law-breaker in order 
that its majesty may be upheld and the peace 
of society secured by the wholesome restraints 
of fear. Under this conception, law punishes 
the offender in order that other men may be 
afraid to offend. In the third and highest 
stage, the reformative principle of law comes 
into clear view and takes the leadership. 
The regulative idea does not vanish. The 
idea of a positive guilt in crime is not lost. 
But both become subordinate to the higher 
idea of a moral purpose in law, — the rescue and 
reformation of the offender. Rectoral justice 
still remains a necessity of government, but 



184 The Message of the Cross 

reformative justice appears as the supreme 
necessity of a moral order of society. 

No man can study the history of laws, no 
man can read the story of prison reform and 
compare the penal statutes of three centuries 
ago with those of to-day, without perceiving 
that there has been a wonderful progress in 
this direction. And side by side with it, not 
always with equal steps, but always in the same 
direction, we see a progress in the interpreta- 
tion of atonement. 
The larger The old idea, that Christ died because God 
*rn*! ^ ^ ^^^ insulted and must punish somebody, fades 
out. The conception of the death of Jesus as 
a mere exhibition of governmental severity for 
the sake of keeping order in the universe, 
becomes too narrow. The measuring of the 
precise amount of Christ's suffering, as a quid 
fro quo for an equal amount of penalty incurred 
by human sin, no longer satisfies the moral 
sense. The cross itself, with its simplicity, its 
generosity of sacrifice, its evident reforming 
and regenerating power upon the heart, — the 
cross itself leads the race upward and onward 
in the interpretation of its message. 

Whatever else the sufferings of Jesus may 
mean, whatever unsearchable necessities of the 
divine government they may meet, they must 



cross. 



The Message of the Cross 185 

meet this great requirement, this ultimate ideal 
of all moral law. Their end must be right- 
eousness, their purpose must be "to make us 
good." 

So the cross comes with a deeper message The inspira- 
than mere vindication of law, or mere exemption *^^^ ^-^ 

' ^ cross. 

from penalty. It says to every man : " Christ 
was crucified with thee, that thou mightest be 
crucified with Him. He died for thee, that 
thou shouldest not henceforth live unto thyself, 
but unto Him who died for thee and rose again. 
Rise with Him into the new life. Never de- 
spair. Never surrender to remorse or fear or 
death. Come up with Christ, come on with 
Christ, into the ransomed life." 

There is one more idea in which there has The inward- 
been a real advance; and that is, the idea of ^«««^/«*^- 
sin. Here I do not think it is possible for us 
to trace the progress through the centuries, as 
we can trace the ideas of human solidarity and 
of law. But certainly there is in the deepest 
and best modern thought a more profound and 
vital conception of the nature of sin, than there 
was in the ages when it was imagined that a 
murderer or an adultress could "square the 
record" by building a church or endowing a 
monastery. I think we feel now, if we admit 



186 



The Message of the Gross 



The cross 
and the 
Comforter. 



that there is such a thing as sin at all, that it 
cannot be in any sense a mere external. " The 
laws of God are written in the human soul, and 
the sin of man is a sin against the law of his 
own nature." ^ 

There is an unnaturalness in sin which is the 
worst kind of unworthiness. It cannot pos- 
sibly be taken away by any outward pardon, 
by any formal justification at the bar of a law 
which is external to us. Not only must the 
law which is above us be fulfilled, but also the 
law which is within us must be restored. This 
can only be done by the renewal of a vital com- 
munion with God, who is the author of both 
laws. He must be our deliverer outwardly and 
inwardly, — 

" Be of sin the double cure 
Save me from its guilt and power.** 

The cross speaks to us not only of the death 
of Christ for us, but of the life of the Spirit in 
us. This was the interpretation which Jesus 
Himself put upon it. He said, " It is expedient 
for you that I go away : for if I go not away 
the Comforter will not come unto you."^ Cer- 
tainly we have not entered into the full mean- 
ing of Christ's death until we have learned to 

1 Lyman Abbott, The Evolution of Christianity. 

2 John xvi. 7. 



The Message of the Cross 187 

see in it the condition and the means of the dis- 
pensation of the Spirit. 

I do not profess to know the significance of 
this on the divine side. Why the Comforter 
would not come unless Christ went away, 
we cannot tell. But on the human side the 
truth is not difficult to apprehend. The vision 
of Christ's suffering and death makes it in- 
finitely easier for us to receive the Comforter. 
It breaks the bonds of that rigid and pedantic 
notion of God which exhibits Him as remote, 
inflexible, impassible. It shows us that He is 
great enough and good enough to suffer with 
us in order to deliver us from sin. It diffuses 
through the soul the fragrance of a new kind 
of forgiveness, — the only real forgiveness, — a 
forgiveness which not only blots out guilt, but 
opens the heart's door to the Spirit and restores 
divine fellowship. 

Thus it seems to me that the message of the The unfold- 
cross, because it is a living message, must be 
ever growing and drawing new words into its 
service, and charging them with richer meaning. 

The theory of the atonement will never be 
completed until the discipline and education of 
humanity are completed. 

I turn to the literature of Christianity, and I 



ing of the 
message. 



188 The Message of the Cross 

find there the experience of peace with God, 
through the atonement of Christ crucified, 
uttered in a thousand ways, expressed in a 
thousand forms which rise spontaneously out 
of the varying characters and conditions of 
men. This is the strange thing, the beautiful 
thing, the vital thing, about this experience. 
It is not possible to reduce it to one fixed and 
final statement. It is forever changing, and 
growing, and expanding, because it is a living 
experience, an ethical reality, an element of the 
moral life. And as a man's thought of sin and 
his knowledge of sin are deepened by living, as 
his idea of God and his fellowship with God are 
purified and uplifted by believing, so his sense 
of reconciliation with God through Christ must 
grow purer and deeper and loftier to keep its 
place in his inner life. 
To each man You come to a man with your theory of the 
bri ^^^t' atonement, and he says, "Yes, perhaps it means 
own bless- that to you, but it means something else, some- 
*'^^* thing far more precious, to me." You come to 

another man, and he says : " No doubt there is 
truth in your view, but it is not all the truth. 
Christ crucified means more than that to me." 
And so it ought to be, so it must be, if the 
atonement has a real place in the inner life. 
We ought not to expect, we ought not to wish. 



The Message of the Cross 189 

that it should ever be defined or explained in 
a formula valid for all men and for all time. 
Whatever it may be in itself, whatever it may 
be in its objective relations to God's govern- 
ment of the world, for us it must be a progres- 
sive, growing, expanding element of spiritual 
peace and power. 



needed 
to-day. 



190 The Message of the Cross 



IV 

The cross This expanding message of tlie cross, then, is 

what I believe to be the true gospel for a world 
of sin. The heart of it never changes. "Herein 
is love, not that we loved God, but that he 
loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitia- 
tion for our sins." 

Is such a gospel as this unsuited to the 
present age? Is such a gospel as this a low 
gospel, a narrow gospel, an immoral gospel, an 
obsolete gospel, a gospel to be ashamed of in 
the presence of learning and refinement and 
moral earnestness ? Let the men whose hearts 
have been cleansed and ennobled by it — the 
men like Paul, and Augustine, and Francis of 
Assisi, and Martin Luther, and John Wesley — 
make answer. 

Is such an experience as this an unreal expe- 
rience, a fantastic thing, a thing of no great 
consequence, of no large influence in 

" The very world which is the world 
Of all of us, — the place where in the end 
We find our happiness, or not at all " ? 

Let the answer come from the triumph in the 
midst of sorrow, the courage in the face of 
death, and the steadfast devotion to every 



The Message of the Cross 191 

noble cause, of those who have learned to say, 
" The life that I now live in the flesh I live by 
the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and 
gave himself for me." 

Is such a message as this to the inner life of 
man no longer needed, no longer of value, in 
these latter days of enlightenment, in these 
high places of culture ? Let the unchanged, 
struggling, sinful heart of man make answer. 

Burdened with the weight of responsibilities 
to which we have never lived up, disenchanted 
by the sad advance of a knowledge with which 
our vital wisdom has not kept pace, stained 
and dishonoured by sins of selfishness and pride 
and impurity and unbrotherliness and greed and 
avarice and anger, which our very privileges 
charge with a tenfold guilt, — delicate and self- 
complacent offenders, men who know but do 
not practise, heirs of all the ages, who have 
bartered our birthright, and declined our duty, 
and sinned against light a thousand times, — 
how stand we in the sight of God, in these 
latter days, without a Saviour from our sins ? 

Is this an easy age, a careless age, a peaceful, 
secure, sin-free age for the inner life ? On 
every side, with growing knowledge, the shades 
of the prison-house close around us. 

The moralists tell us of ever increasing 



192 



The Message of the Cross 



A welcome 
for Christ 
in the world 
of sin. 



obligations, duties, demands of personal and 
social righteousness. The standard rises, but 
the inspiration sinks. Students of life tell us 
of the permanence and power of evil, the taint 
of blood, the corruption of nature, the force of 
degeneration, the heavy fetters of heredity. 
We need a God with us to set us free. Phi- 
losophers tell us that there may be a God, but 
that He is certainly distant, impersonal, un- 
known, unknowable. 

What an age for a divine Redeemer, a liber- 
ating God incarnate, a real atonement to deliver 
us from the coil of sin! 

" Far and wide, though all unknowing, 
Pants for Thee each human breast ; 
Human tears for Thee are flowing. 
Human hearts in Thee would rest." 

Is there not a welcome in the world to-day for 
the Conqueror from Edom? Is there not a 
mission still in our inner life for the Son of 
God, who loved us and gave Himself for us ? 

"The very God! think, Abib ; dost thou think? 
So the All-great were the All-loving, too, — 
So through the thunder comes a human voice 
Saying, ' O heart I made, a heart beats here ! 
Face my hands fashioned, see it in myself ! 
Thou hast no power, nor mayest conceive of mine, 
But love I gave thee with myself to love. 
And thou must love me who have died for thee / '" 



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